Windows Phone Marketplace reaches 40,000 apps

THERE ARE now over 40,000 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace, giving Microsoft a tenth of the number of apps that its rivals Apple and Google offer to their users.

Microsoft said in a blog post today that content is being added to its app store at a rate of 165 items per day. In the last 30 days, 85 per cent of submissions were apps and 15 per cent were games, while 68 per cent were free, 23 per cent were paid and 9 per cent were paid with free trial.

The company said 40,189 items have now been published. Of these, 10,882 were added in the last 90 days and 4,770 were added in the last 30 days. These items were submitted by 10,731 different publishers.

At the current growth rate, Microsoft thinks that Windows Phone Marketplace will reach the 50,000 app mark in the second or third week of January 2012.

However, as is true with all apps stores, the total number of Windows Phone Marketplace's published items is not the same as the number of items available to consumers. Of the 40,198 items published to the Marketplace, just over 5,500 are no longer available after being removed by Microsoft or withdrawn by the publisher.

In addition, some apps are only available in select markets. In the US there are about 33,950 available, and in UK there are 32,332.

Last month, we reported that Google has seen its Android Market surpass 500,000 apps, but 37 per cent of its applications were pulled down post publication. Apple's App Store still leads in total number of apps, with 600,000 available.

More than third of apps on the Android Market are booted off and Apple's traditionally strict App Store censors approve 24 per cent of apps that later end up on the scrapheap.

However, Windows Phone Marketplace has only 13 per cent of its apps booted off after approval. That might just indicate that not many people are downloading them and trying them out, or perhaps it really is a case of quality over quantity. µ