The Windows Phone Marketplace is expanding at a pretty decent clip. While there aren’t nearly as many third party apps available for Windows Phone 7 as for Android or iOS yet, there are more than 25,000 apps in the Marketplace according to windowsphoneapplist. That number may be a little off, since other trackers have different figures. But WinRumors notes that it was just a few months ago that only 15,000 apps were available.
Of course, quality counts at least as much as quantity. After all, do you really need access to 400,000 iOS apps, or just to the few dozen you want the most? But we’ve also seen some movement on that front, with some of the hottest Android and iOS apps finding their way to Windows Phone 7. This week alone we saw the introduction of Angry Birds, Kik Messenger, Gowalla, and Epicurious, among others.
At this rate it’s going to take a long time for Microsoft’s app store to catch up to Google’s or Apple’s. But you can certainly make a case that you don’t need to attract the most developers — just the best ones.
In other news, nobody is even coming close to toppling Apple’s lead in the tablet app space. MacStories notes that as of this week there are more than 100,000 iPad apps available in the App Store. That’s not counting all of the iPhone apps you can also run on the iPad — these are apps designed specifically for the 9.7 inch tablet’s 1024 x 768 pixel display.
HP says there are about 300 tablet apps for webOS this week, and there are only a few hundred apps available for Android 3.x Honeycomb tablets even though the first Honeycomb tablets started shipping in February.
This app “race” is ridiculous. Who used 50,000 apps? No one does! the average person uses only a few apps, thus what is important is that there are high quality apps that you will use. . . compared to Windows, there isn’t. All mobile ecosystems currently blow when it comes to overall quality.
Gee, the idea that anybody USES 50,000 apps is not the point, now, is it? Say you want a weather app. Or any of a thousand or so of types of application that exist. If you have 50,000 apps, you can look through the available apps of any type, listen to podcasts for recommendations, and pick and choose between rivals. In other words, “choice,” which is something that Apple haters say they love in any other circumstances. The sheer number of apps bring competition. You can’t use the Google turn-by-turn app, but navigation apps on iOS range from the cost of $10 a month to about $30 a year as a subscription. Is the Google turn-by-turn that good? I don’t know. Google won’t write it for iOS. But there’s a multitude of apps on the iPhone 4. I’m partial to Motion X.