Microsoft delivers the numbers on Windows Phone 7

ANYONE who was under a rock when Microsoft launched and then fluffed the first update to its Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system will be pleased to see that the firm has compiled some statistics about the software.

Brandon Watson, senior director of developer experience at Microsoft, blew out the anniversary candles and thanked developers for their role in making the OS a success.

"Personally, this has been the hardest and most rewarding year of my professional career. As a team we felt like this was as good a time as any to take stock of what the year has produced," he said.

"Given the one year anniversary of the tool set, I [want] to acknowledge the engineering work that began long before any of us knew what the Windows Phone developer platform would be."

Perhaps forgetting that the first major update release for the operating system was borked, aborted, and accused of bricking phones, Watson added, "Evangelizing the platform and our developer ecosystem is incredibly easy when the team building it has done such an amazing job."

The software update failure was not the only event in the Windows Phone year, however, and according to Watson there are some interesting numbers to complement it.

For example, Windows Phone Developer tools, which include Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone and Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone have been downloaded 1.5 million times. Some of these users, 36,000, were apparently so impressed that they opted to become paid members of the Windows Phone Developer community.

This community has created 11,500 applications for the software, a number that Watson added omitted 'lite' apps like wallpapers that often providers use to inflate their own numbers.

"We recognize the importance of getting great apps on our platform and not artificially inflating the number of actual apps available to customer by listing 'wallpapers' as a category, or perhaps allowing competitor's apps to run on the platform to increase 'tonnage'.", he said.

"We also don't believe in the practice of counting 'lite' apps as unique quality content. In reality they only exist because developers can't have a Trial API and must therefore do extra work. Finally, we don't double and triple count apps which are submitted in multiple languages."

Microsoft is adding 1,200 new developers a week to its applications store, and 1,100 of its applications are generating advertising revenues. Meanwhile Windows Phone customers are downloading around 12 apps a month each.

Interestingly, Watson did not say how many apps had been downloaded, but perhaps that information is for a later post. µ