I would have loved to see Microsoft giving out the actual sales numbers but this helps nonetheless to gauge the interest in the WP7 platform. 11,500 Apps in 5 months is a great stat and with 100 Apps per day and 1200 Developers (serious and paying) per week, this number will only grow faster. Very soon the App numbers will not be a differentiator for competing platforms.
Some Key stats below.
A Year Later–The Windows Phone 7 Numbers That Matter
•1.5 Million - The Windows Phone Developer Tools, consisting of Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone and Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone have been downloaded over 1.5 million times. Put differently, the number of downloads equates to the size of the entire population of Philadelphia. (Somewhere a NY Giants fan just screamed.)
•36,000 – People are talking a lot about the number of developers in their ecosystem. It would be easy for us to say that we had 1.5 million given the developer tools downloaded, or we could talk about the number of people we have on mailing lists, but we won’t. We’d rather give a nod to the 36,000 members of the AppHub community who have voted with their wallets and become members of the Windows Phone developer community.
•“The number:” 11,500 – What is an app? It’s a question that really begs some scrutinizing. For us, from the beginning, we have always been focused on quality over quantity. 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.” 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.
•1,200 – While the 36,000 registered developers are nice to talk about, the 1,200 newly registered developers we are adding every week is incredibly encouraging. Developers are pragmatists and they are going where there is ample opportunity.
•12 – Customers love our apps. Love them. Windows Phone customers download an average of 12 apps each month. Considering that the phone has only been widely available for around 4 months, that’s very healthy demand.
•1.8 – Nothing upsets developers more than not knowing what is going on with their app during certification. Since opening the Marketplace for application ingestion developers have experienced an average time to certification of 1.8 days. Certification can yield a pass or fail, but developers get an answer on average in days – not weeks, nor months.