Steady gaining traction !
Rafe Blandford, AllAboutWindowsPhone
May 15th 2012
More than 90,000 apps have now been published in the
Windows Phone Marketplace and new content is currently being added at the rate
of 250 apps per day. At the time of writing, 92,383 apps have been published.
Of these, 24,371 were added in the last three months and 7,409 were added in
the last month. These apps come from just over 22,000 different publishers.
Milestones
The 50,000 app mark was reached on December 27th, the
60,000 mark on January 22nd, the 70,000 mark on February 23rd, and the 80,000
milestone on March 26th. It has taken an additional 35 days to reach the 90,000
mark.
At the current (April) pace, the 100,000 milestone will
be reached in June, a little later than previously
predicted, due to the lower than anticipated number of apps published in
April (a trend that is continuing in our early May data). Microsoft recently
noted that some developers had reported slowdowns in the app approval
and publishing process, which may be creating a bottleneck in app
submissions. We also anticipate some slow down as developers work on making
existing apps compatible with the reduced (RAM) Windows Phone 7.5 devices
(e.g. Nokia Lumia 610) and as project workflow and timing begins to
be impacted by availability of information about the next version of Windows
Phone.
Number of Content Items (Apps) Published
The graph below shows the growth in the total number of
apps (content items) published to the Windows Phone Marketplace over the last
18 months.
In common with other application stores, the total number
of published items is not the same as the number of items available to
consumers. Of the 92,383 items published to the Marketplace, just over 10,500
are no longer available (removed by Microsoft or withdrawn by the publisher).
In addition, some apps are only available in select markets.
This means the number of available items to a consumer, in a given market, is
lower than the number of published items. The current approximate figures
are: US (77,536), UK (73,472), France (70,381), Spain (66,361), Italy
(65,890), Germany (67,440), Australia (67,435), Russia (51,209), Brazil
(44,676) India (67,451) and China (29,379).
Of these markets, China has enjoyed the strongest growth
since our last report. This would suggest a combined effort by Microsoft and
Nokia, to encourage existing developers to prepare their content for the
Chinese market and to attract new developers from China, has been sucessful.
In April, an average of 340 apps were added to Windows
Phone Marketplace per day. This was lower than January (375 per day) and March,
but more than February (average of 250 per day) and significantly higher than
the same time last year (105 per day).
As we previously noted, the quantity of apps is best used
only as a guideline metric. The quality of apps in an app store is also very
important, but is more difficult to judge objectively.
In January,
we started looking at how many times an app has been rated as a metric. This
can be seen as an analog for quality since only applications and games seen as
useful are likely to be downloaded and rated multiple times (spam apps will be
ignored). In the UK Marketplace (total 73,472) just over 5,800 apps have been
rated 5 or more times. This means the proportion of quality apps is holding
steady at just over 8% of the Windows Marketplace.
As we noted in our previous report:
There is a perception that Windows Phone is missing big
name apps (e.g. Instagram, Words with Friends, Angry Birds Space). As the
Windows Phone Marketplace moves towards 100,000+ apps, we expect to see a shift
away from quantity metrics to quality metrics when assessing and commenting on
app stores. This is overdue, but caution must be exercised as there can be a
tendency to focus on the presence or absence of individual apps, rather than
the overall picture.
In app terms, there is no doubt that Windows Phone is,
currently, in a weaker position than iOS and Android. In quantitative terms, it
faces a seemingly Sisyphean task to gain parity with a moving target.
Nonetheless, in qualitative terms, there is a point at which, as far as
consumers are concerned, there is little or no difference.
Nokia's recent announcement of a number
of exclusive app partnerships at CTIA is a good example of the way in which
more attention is being paid to both quality and the presence of app brand. In
addition, Microsoft recently announced a number of initiatives that favoured
quality over quantity for the Marketplace. Despite this, the overall
quantity metric remains important, with the total number of apps available
continuing to be quoted in most key Windows Phone-related press releases.
Content by category and license
The chart below shows the proportion of content in each
of the Windows Phone Marketplace's top level categories. Entertainment remains
the the single biggest category (17,079 items). The next three biggest
categories are tools + productivity (13,605), games (11,509) and books +
reference (10,821 items). The four biggest categories (out of seventeen) make
up 59% of the content.
There have been no major changes in the proportion of
content by category in the last few months with all categories adding content
approximately in proportion to their respective existing sizes.
68% of items in the Windows Phone Marketplace are free,
10% are paid with a free trial and 22% are paid. The proportion of free apps
has been slowly increasing (by a few percentage points) since the middle of
last year. The wider availability of advertising SDKs for Windows Phone and an
increasing willingness, by developers, to try ad-supported business models can
explain most of this small increase.
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