Windows Phone Marketplace hits 50,000-app mark

Nearly a year and two months after its
launch, Microsoft's Windows Phone
Marketplace has hit a new milestone.
The collection of apps and games that run
on Microsoft's Windows Phone devices
now sits north of 50,000 applications,
according to a count by the blog All
About Windows Phone. More than a third
of those were added in the past three
months, and nearly 16 percent within the
past 30 days, the site said.
In actuality, users have access to fewer
than the 50,126 items on the store as of
today, with about 6,000 apps having been
removed from the store over time, cutting
the total count in the U.S. to 42,655 apps.

The
Windows Phone Marketplace's last big
benchmark was 40,000 apps, a number
Microsoft reached less than a month ago,
followed by 45,000 on December 12. Both
of those counts, which were logged by All
About Windows Phone, set Microsoft to
hit the magic 50,000 number by the first
week in January, a benchmark today's
total bests by a week.
In addition to the total, the new numbers
show that the volume of apps and games
added to the Windows Live Marketplace
each day is increasing. At the 50,000
mark, Microsoft's publishing 265 new
games and apps each day, up from the
165 a day total from mid-November.
As mentioned in previous coverage,
Microsoft's app volume comes in
considerably lower than that of its
competitors, which had a multi-year head
start on their platforms. Apple's App
Store, for instance, tops 500,000 apps as
of May, with a more recent and unofficial
count from app tracker Appshopper.com
putting that total at 526,855. 150,000 of
those apps were published inside a four
month time period. As for Google, an
overall app count from analytics firm
Distimo pegged its volume at 380,297
applications in October.
Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 in
Europe near the end of October last year,
bringing it to North America in the second
week of November. The platform is a
reboot of the company's Windows Mobile
platform and ties in with a number of its
software and services including Microsoft
Office and Xbox Live.