Microsoft Touts ‘Quality Over Quantity’ in its App Store

 

Microsoft employee Brandon Watson on Wednesday published a blog post headlined “A Year Later–The Windows Phone 7 Numbers That Matter,” in which he noted, among other things, that “we have always been focused on quality over quantity” in the Windows Marketplace store, which has 11,500 apps.

“What is an app?” Mr. Watson asks. He then goes on to take a few swipes at Microsoft’s competitors, saying: “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.”

He goes on to note that 7,500 of those 11,500 apps are paid, with another 1,100 that are making money through in-app advertising. He also says that Windows Phone customers download an average of 12 apps per month. In addition, Windows Phone Developer Tools have been downloaded 1.5 million times, and there are 36,000 registered developers in the program, with another 1,200 signing up each week.

As CNET noted, Apple has over 350,000 iOS apps available, with the 10 billionth download happening this past January. Google told CNET that the Android Market now has over 150,000 apps, and CNET pointed to an interview it conducted with an IT security firm earlier this year in which the Android Market was predicted to overtake the App Store as the world’s largest app marketplace by mid-2012.