Windows Phone Marketplace hits 100,000 apps mark

Windows Phone Marketplace has reached the 100,000 app milestone, an important benchmark for any smartphone operating system that wants to compete in today’s market.

To be exact, developers have now published 100,145 apps in the Marketplace. The mark was reached in 20 months.

That means the Marketplace, which is adding more than 300 apps per day, reached the feat faster than the Android market, which did so in 24 months, but not quite as fast as Apple’s App Store, which got there in 16 months.

Windows Phone still falls behind the App Store, which leads the way with 600,000 apps, and the Android Market, which has 500,000 apps. BlackBerry comes in fourth place with its App World, which has yet to reach the 100,000 mark after nearly 40 months.

And although more than 100,000 Windows Phone apps have been published, users of the phone can access only 88,371 of them because some of the apps published have also either been taken down by Microsoft or their developers.

For American users of the operating system, there are only 77,450 apps because some apps are either exclusive to other parts of the world or are not available in English, according to All About Windows Phone.

Nevertheless, the recent growth rate of apps for Windows Phone is impressive. It took the operating system 15 months to get to 50,000 apps but only five more to get another 50,000, a result of a recent big push by Microsoft to get more apps onto its platform.

This is good news for Microsoft because the biggest concern of many would-be customers is that a smartphone wouldn’t have many of the apps they’d want.

Two-thirds of the apps on the Windows Phone Marketplace are free, 23% are paid and 10% offer a free trial before charging. Most of the paid apps cost 99 cents.

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