Microsoft is trying hard to make Windows Phone a strong third alternative to Android and iOS. For that the company needs to boost up its app ecosystem.
The company has just announced that at the last count, there were over 1,30,000 apps and games in the Windows Phone Store. The total number of apps have witnessed a significant increase from 75,000 that the company was offering around a year ago.
Furthermore, 15,000 of these apps were Windows Phone 8-specific apps. This is a significant achievement considering that Windows Phone 8 was launched in October 2012.
Shedding more light on the numbers, Microsoft revealed at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it has witnessed a 75 percent increase in app downloads and a 91 percent increase in paid app revenue. It also confirmed that the total number of transactions on the store hit billion. Dissecting the data on a per user basis, Microsoft commented that an average user downloads about 55 apps.
Microsoft via its Blog has shared that the developer community for the Windows Phone platform too has seen an upward trend. Within 90 days of the launch of Windows Phone 8, there were over 40,000 developer registrations submitted to Microsoft.
However, in comparison to Apple and Android, Windows is still way behind. Google Play store is currently offering 675,000+ apps, while Apple has over 775,000 in its App Store.
The newest operating system BlackBerry 10 also boasts of having a catalog of over 70,000 apps. However, the Canadian smartphone-maker has been criticised for the overall quality of a majority of these apps.
Though number of applications is a good achievement for any platform but the bigger question still remains in terms of quality of the apps. A lot of users are still not very pleased with the kind of applications that are being offered in Windows Phone Store.
