Windows Phone 7 hits 5,000 apps in 2 months, equaling Palm's webOS - Page 2

Microsoft said how many they sold - they sold 1.5 million licenses.

Unlike Apple, MS does not sell phones, so when MS says it sold 1.5 million liscenses, that is what they sold.

I don't think Windows Phone 7 UI really lends itself to apps. Live tiles are cool, but make it hard to figure out what app hides behind the tiles (is it twitter update or a facebook update). Plus the scrolling list will make for a long scroll to find what you want (folders made it a lot easier to group apps and save the swipes).

We'll see how well it does.

Excuse me, but apps and app stores have been around since the Palm came on the scene. Not an idea created by Apple.

Shareware and Freeware have existed since the early days of PCs, and phone apps can be found on websites like Tucows, MacUpdate and VersionTracker. When you consider the number of PC-users vs. Mac users, you'd expect an even larger number of apps for Windows 7 Moblie. At this time, one app developed for iPhone and/or Android would make you more money than two or more, developed for Windows 7, especially since copy and paste is not supported. Until the user base for Windows 7 Mobile dramatically increases, your app is betaware.

Imagine the boasting in that office. "Read'em and weep, boys! We just caught Palm!"

Even though you are technically correct that Apple's was not the first "app store" they certainly were the first one that actually worked that had many customers.

I've used almost every kind of portable hardware I've ever heard of from Palm pilot days through Pocket PC and Windows mobile right up to current day and I never bought a single thing from a mobile store until I used the iPhone.

Before iPhone, the model was primarily one of downloading from web sites (as you yourself mention), or purchasing from brick and mortar stores.

I didn't see anywhere in the news as to how many phones MSFTs partners actually sold to consumers and how many were activated. If they sold many of the 1.5 million phones that were manufactured and ordered, then their App Store has a good chance to be a success. If they didn't sell most of these phones, then it doesn't matter how many Apps there are. Their store will not be a success unless there are sufficient customers. If there are sufficient customers, then the developers will come. If not, they won't. All the other chatter doesn't matter.

Neal

You are right, we do not know how many phones were sold and activated. A couple of points

1. The general tone of these types of comments (not yours) is that MS is hiding something by not announcing phone sales to consumers. However, as I said, that is not a MS issue, as MS does not sell phones, they sell an OS. MS is not "hiding anything", they get paid when they sell the OS, not when the phone sells.

2. The hiding issue leads many to believe that the phones are not selling. Some bloggers are claiming that only a 100k phones have been sold. However, unless the laws of economics have been repealed, this does not make a whole lot of sense. Why would the phone makers buy OS's for phones that are not selling? The most parsimonious explanation is that the phones are selling at a respectable rate, if not phenomenal rate.

3. Customers and developers are a bit of a chicken and egg thing. However, I think the app issue is largely overblown, as most research suggests that people really only use a handful of apps on a regular basis, and those apps are on the WP7 marketplace.

As an aside, the app issue is a bit comical. When WP7 was released, many people claimed that releasing 3 phones per carrier (where the differentiating factors were a physical keyboard or slide out speakers) was a horrible mistake because people would become confused by 3 options, and hence would not buy a phone. On the other hand, people can choose between 1000's of apps of the same type, with absolute clarity and lack of confusion on the Apple app store - but 3 phones is beyond the cognitive capacities of the average consumer.

Sure, those are app stores, but its that like saying a WAP browser is an web browser? I think nowadays when we talk about app stores and web browsers the bar for the modern example starts with something a lot more robust.



Apple still takes the lion share of profits from the worlds handset vendors with a lot of room to grow to other carriers and other technologies. IOW, theyve done it and maintained it without already saturating the market with no room to grow. This is good for Apple and shareholders.

I think its inevitable that Android is the de facto standard by mobile OS unit numbers. There are just too many areas Android can saturate that Apple, MS, and RiM can touch. Only another free OS could do it, but none are as modern enough. That said, Apple and MS (and maybe even RiM) will continue to increase profits massively, whilst most the Android-based vendors will be be lucky to keep themselves above water, with a few being clear, in the black leaders of that platform, albeit paling in comparison to those that build their own OS and HW.

Let's not forget the iPod Touch, which helped Apple achieve those platform app numbers to a large extent. MS, Palm and company can't match that advantage.

Probably better then Android from the developer standpoint. I did some C# programming years ago. The language is nice, but the API doesn't feel as complete or inspired as Cocoa or UIKit. I'm not sure how much they took out for Silverlight to make it lightweight though. I have friends that only have good things to say about the XNA game development environment. If any serious interest gets behind it, there will probably be some decent apps. Microsoft needs to prove that they can sell phones first though.

I think that they may have a little nicer environment for developers then Android. They have a decent IDE (unlike Android), a slightly better language, and more mature APIs. QNX is nice but too primitive on the GUI side. Adobe Air (the other half of the PlayBook that is supposed to counter the weaknesses in QNX) is basically html and flash and will make most app developers cringe. WebOS suffered from the same problem (but is slightly nicer). In some ways Microsoft and RIM's new OS are opposites. Microsoft has good UI and development tools but a poor OS. RIM has a nice OS but poor development tools and UI. Android is in the middle. Apple does well in all areas.

I owned three palm pilots over several years and I don't remember ever buying an app. I think I downloaded a few free games and wrote a couple programs, but mostly just used the built-in productivity apps. I've bought hundreds of apps for iOS devices. Apple definitely has the first mainstream store. I remember the non-free apps being a bit more expensive for the palm pilot. Maybe around $25+. That was in the late 90s, so it would have felt like more too.

And I had one on my Australian Vodafone Live! phones BUT we could NOT get the same Apps even if we had the same model of phone which is the difference that Apple made, on any network the Apps are substantially the same.

...and some developers content that they can not make money on the app store because they're not in the top ten... How dare they!

Hundreds of Apps? I am always amazed when i read this. I'm not having a go, i just can't get my head around it. I had iPhone for three years, I've had an iPad since launch, and there's no way i have paid for more than 50 Apps, or download more than a couple of hundred. I'd love to see your list. I go on the app store every week or so, and come off with the same feeling of nothing being worth even £1, I just give the odd free trial and delete again. Unless people arej using it for gaming, how many weather/converlsion/find your whatever/news aggregator apps can you part with money for? Or even be arced downloading and managing?

Like I said, not having a go, this applies to any platform on any device. I just dnt see the point, especially on the iPad with a big screen browser.

MS caught up to a long-dead platform. What an achievement.

Just to add to the app discussion, I've got around 450, collected since the opening of the App Store. Love em. It's all about a rich app experience for me. I can totally see the iPad, for example, replacing my MBP for all but the most intensive applications. I actually surf the net more with my iPhone 4 than my MBP these days.

One other item to throw in the mix.

MS developers had almost a 12 month lead time to know the new platform was coming and I believe almost 6 months with the SDK. MS Developers hit the ground running.

iPhone app developers hit the ground from almost full stop.

Handango and PocketGear (the latter bought out the former early this year) were examples of cross-platform online app stores that existed before the Apple App Store model blazed its way onto the scene. Microsoft generally directed those WMx users that desired apps to go to Handango.

As usual, while there is an argument to be made for the Apple model's merits, it was mainly the failings of the existing models that led to the exodus of developers.

In the first place, their layouts and search tools were incredibly poor, and they were not generally well known to smartphone and handset users, who were not used to downloading apps in the first place, and needed a lot of hand-holding to do so. Prof. Peabody is a long-time PDA and handset user that attests personally to this bygone trend in his earlier post.

In the second and decisive place, they took a massive 45% - 55% of the smaller developers' takings and amazingly, an even higher cut (in the 70s) from the high-volume, high profile gamers like EA, Sega et al. The economics of this policy is still beyond me so if someone could explain this anomaly, I'm all ears.

In stepped Apple with an SDK, an offer to cover all micro and macro-payment and transaction handling and, as the coup-de-grace, announcement of a 70%-to-30% cut in favour of the developer. The exodus/gold rush was immediate and devastating.

And the rest, as they say, is history...

Apple won the war. Get over it.

You're cherry-picking facts yourself, clownboy. Fact is, Windows is operating in an environment in which the phone-app industry has already been established. It was established, of course, by Apple and its iPhone. Before Apple, smartphone apps was an industry that simply did not exist. (One can quibble with this to some extent - no doubt clownboy will do exactly that - because a few apps did exist for the 'pre-smartphone' market. But it was nothing compared to what it is today.) That is the one and only reason that the Windows phone has more apps a couple months after its launch than the iPhone had after its launch. Apple had to do nothing less than create this industry from scratch.

But clownboy - with transparent, desperate dishonesty - wants to pretend he's comparing Apples (so to speak) to Apples. And since he has absolutely no shame, he tops it off by pretending it's AppleInsider that's being disingenuous here.

That's not the only fact that clownboy chose to leave out of his little screed, either. Fact is, it's well-known that MS paid developers to get on board. They also developed many of the apps in their store themselves.

Strange that these facts can't be mentioned - by you, clownboy. No?

Go back in your hole now.

That's an awesome milestone! (Of course, iOS has 5000 fart & flashlight apps alone). Please report every time Windows Phone 7's applications reaches some multiple of 10000. We'll be sure to look in the rearview mirror and say, "congratulations, Microsoft!"

I call BS on your "check". It seems like a fairly decent distribution of apps from a mix of pro and indie app devs. Just from that top free page you're missing Facebook, IMDb, Shazam, The Weather Channel, Weatherbug, Fandango, Titter, Google, Last.fm, Flixster, Oregon Trail, Assassin's Creed, Bejeweled, Need For Speed, Sims, and Flight Control apps that I recognize from my own iPhone app purchases.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphon...s/default.aspx

Looking using Zune there are very few games which means your assertion these are all XNA Game Studio ports is wrong. The majority of junk apps appear to be collected under the "entertainment" category and it's not the majority of the app store. I was surprised that the music category was as large as it was.

I found useful apps for things like craigslist, amazon price check, recipies, bar code scanners under lifestyles (along with a few more junk apps). The news category has NPR, BBC, a bunch of weather apps, AP mobile and rss feed apps. Travel has Kayak, Tavelocity, Zagat and a bunch of language apps.

This is a good variety. As far as the speed of development goes, the best comparison perhaps is to compare against the number of iPad apps. The iPad hit 5000 apps in one month including all universal apps. So 5K in two months is very good for MS.

indeed.

How many did Microsoft pay for? There was an article earlier that said they were going to buy their way into acceptance.

Well likely never know, but I suppose quite a few, but thats how the game works. Note that when Apple introduced their SDK and App Store they had invited some developers to Cupertino to work on apps for the event and had a VC announce $100M in funding for devs. While these are different approaches both Apple and MS both created a foundation to encourage developer support.

Go to a win doze site and sprout your love of micros$&t. I detest m$ and don't want to read posts that defend them ok.

Microsoft have created the best foundation for a mobile OS and the best mobile paradigm in the market, but they still have a very long way to go.

5000 applications would be great if it was a list of the 5000 most popular iOS applications, but it isn't. They are still missing some really major applications like Pandora and Skype. Personally I think they should be funding the creation of these themselves.

Add to that the sparse feature list that needs filling out and the almost non-existent mind share and it's obvious Microsoft have their work cut out for them.

I am not sure if one needs Pandora, or if it will come, as it directly competes with the Zune Pass. I got my wife a WP7, and she had a month free (with 10 song download per month the keep), and I have to say, it is a great service. So, I am not sure that Pandora will make the effort given the Zune Pass.

About 0. Similar to the number of independent devs that got a phone.

The numbers arnt really comparable as on one hand Apple developed the current app store market so they had a harder start, but on the other they were offering an entire year of iPhone sales as the customer base for apps which MS doesn't have.

Also any ideas that an iPhone app could be easy ported to WP7 are just insane. Just compare IMDB on the iPhone to WP7, the phones have completely different styles and an iPhone app would just look stupid on wp7.

That may be true, but people need to buy the phone before they can discover things like the Zune Pass.

Microsoft need Pandora. Even if all Pandora users end up switching to Zune Pass.

I've noticed since the last post that the Kindle app is available and Evernote is on the way.

To me these are more important milestones than "5,000 apps". There is a handful of important apps that Microsoft need to guarantee are available on WP7. Kindle and Evernote are two, Pandora and Skype are two more, and I'm sure there are a few hundred others.

After that it's just games, games and more games. Microsoft should be pumping money into the indy dev community and creating their own games through Microsoft Game Studio's.

When someone asks "so what separates WP7 from iPhone or Android" the answer needs to be "it has better games" rather than "it doesn't have as many features".