Published by Rafe Blandford, All About Windows Phone
More than 100,000 apps have now been published in
the Windows Phone Marketplace and new content is currently being added at the
rate of 313 apps per day. At the time of writing, 100,145 apps have been
published. Of these, 26,493 were added in the last three months and 9,391 were
added in the last month. These apps come from just over 23,825 different
publishers.
Key points
As of June 3rd, 2012:
- 100,145 apps published to the Windows Phone Marketplace over the last 20 months
- 88,371 apps live (available for download, total across 60 countries)
- Windows Phone reached the 100,000 milestone faster than Android (24 months), but slower than iOS (16 months)
- 23,825 publishers (developers)
- Proportion of quality apps (rated five or more times) stable at 8% (UK rating) 12% (US ratings)
It took Windows Phone 14 months to reach 50,000
apps, but only another 5 months to double that figure to 100,000. The 50,000 app
mark was reached on December 27th, 2011, the 60,000 mark on January 22nd, 2012,
the 70,000 mark on February 23rd, and the 80,000 milestone on March 26th, the
90,000 milestone on April 30th. It has taken an additional 33 days to reach the
100,000 mark.
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 19 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 100,145 items published to the Marketplace, 10,357 are no
longer available (withdrawn by Microsoft or unpublished by the developer), a
further 1,492 items are in staging (awaiting an update, in beta or not live for
some other reason). That means there are 88,371 apps currently available for
download (live) on the Windows Phone Marketplace.
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 figures for
live apps (i.e. fully available for download) are: US (77,450), UK (72,933),
France (69,879), Spain (66,361), Italy (68,180), Germany (69,153), Australia
(70,036), Russia (55,052), Brazil (47,453) India (69,771) and China
(33,063).
The graph below shows the number of live apps
available in 59 countries. The 5 groupings visible in the chart align, roughly,
with the date at which the country went live in the Marketplace. The five groups
are Windows Phone launch (October 2010), Mango launch (October 2011), Expansion
3 (January 2012), Expansion 4 (March 2012), and Expansion 5 (April 2012).
Some apps are only distributed
in a single country. This usually applies to apps that contain region-restricted
content or features, are hyper-local (only relevant o one country) or are only
available in a single language. The chart below shows the number of single
market distribution app for each country. Other apps are distributed in multiple
countries, but not all the countries available in the
Marketplace. Developers with such apps may be missing out on potential
downloads.
The majority of apps are published in English
(68,529 of live total). A number of apps are localised into other languages,
with French (5,627), Spanish (4401) and Italian (3225) being the most common.
This represents a surprisingly small proportion of the total number of live
apps. Given the importance of local content and the increased likelihood or
buying/downloading an app if its available in your local language, localisation
is an area that both Microsoft and developers themselves should be looking at
more as the Marketplace continues to grow.
In May, an average of 313 apps were added to
Windows Phone Marketplace per day. This was up from April and almost double the
number from May 2011 (166 per day). The app addition rate has varied over the
first 5 months of 2012, but the overall trend sees an increasing growth rate
from 2011 to 2012.
Quality and quantity
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 72,933)
just over 5,600 apps have been rated 5 or more times. This figure has been
stable for the last few months. For the US Marketplace the same figures are
77,450 and 9560 (12%) respectively.
As we noted in a previous report:
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.
Does 100,000 apps represent a psychological barrier
at which point the number of apps stops mattering? That seems unlikely and, at
the very least, the total app number is always going to be a footnote to any
discussion about app availability. But perhaps it will matter less as app
quality, functionality and discovery become more important. These metrics are
harder to measure in a qualitative fashion, especially when making a comparison
between app stores, so any app store that can create or promote a visible
differentiator (e.g. app matching) may gain an advantage.
Content by category, license and pricing
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 (18,867 items). The next three biggest
categories are tools + productivity (14,591), books + reference (12,816 items)
and games (12,212). The four biggest categories (out of seventeen) make up 59%
of the content.
In May, Books + reference overtook games as the
third biggest category as a result of a large number of single ebooks being added to the Windows Phone
Marketplace.
The pie chart below shows the breakdown of the game
section by sub-category (in the Windows Phone Marketplace, games has the most
sub-categories, by some distance). The most popular sub-category is puzzle +
trivia (4305 games - 35%), followed by action + adventure (1878 games - 15%) and
classics (1692 games - 14%).
67% of items in the
Windows Phone Marketplace are free, 10% are paid with a free trial and 23% are
paid. In the last month there has been a small increase in the proportion of
paid apps, but the more general trend (last 12 months) has seen the proportion
of free apps slowly increase (by a few percentage points overall). The wider
availability of advertising SDKs for Windows Phone and an increasing
willingness, by developers, to try ad-supported business models is the primary
reason for this.
The majority of paid apps
fall into a few price points: $0.99 (61.8%) , $1.29 (4.4%), $1.49 (2.3%), $1.99
(7.7%), $2.99 (4.1%) or $4.99 (2.3%). Relatively few developers have taken
advantage of the new price points, which were introduced last year (e.g. $0.79 -
0.41%).
Comparison with Android and iOS
Both Android and iOS (500,000+ and 600,000+
respectively) have at least five times more apps available than Windows Phone.
However, this metric is, for obvious reasons, strongly correlated to how long an
app store has been in operation. A more interesting comparison is to look at
their relative performance.
Windows Phone has taken 20 months to reach the
100,000 milestone. Android took 24 months (October 2008 - October 2011) to
reach 100,000 apps, reflecting Android's relatively slow start in terms of
device licensees. iOS took 16 months (July 2008 - June 2009) to reach the
same figure, but arguably had an advantage, given it had an installed base of
around 4 million first generation iPhones before the App Store launched.
Blackberry OS has just about reached the 100,000 figure (if you include Playbook
Apps), and the Nokia Store took around 21 months (but includes apps for both
Symbian, Maemo and Series 40 platforms).
This relative comparison would suggest that Windows
Phone Marketplace is a credible challenger to both Apple's App Store and
Google's Play in terms of app metrics. Both Android and iOS accelerated away
from the 100,000 mark. It remains to be seen whether Windows Phone can do the
same, but with Windows Phone 8 on the horizon it would be a reasonable
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