18,000 apps in Marketplace

May 23, 2011 | By Surur

apps-totals18000

After an apparent slow-down last week, the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace has bounded to 18,000 in less than 6 days, standing at 18042 at the time of writing, according to WP7Applist.com. At this rate Marketplace should hit 20,000 apps in the first week of June.

All is however not sunshine and roses, with the effect of Microsoft’s relaxation of policies being clearly felt with the number of low-utility and single purpose apps in Marketplace at present, with examples such as MagiCode Unlimited’s huge number of Quote apps and Hillword Apps’s My MP apps.

Do our readers feel these apps are legitimate, and that boosting the app count at the cost of hundreds of near identical apps is a worthwhile goal, or is Marketplace being senselessly polluted? Let us know below.

Thanks xin sun and Agha for the tip.

About Surur

Site Admin and Windows Phone enthusiast, he has been using Windows Mobile devices since before they were called PocketPC’s. He is currently sporting a HTC 7 Trophy.

Tagged marketplace, windows phone 7

http://twitter.com/Saad073 Saad Hashmi

It’s exactly what happens to any app store. iOS and Android have faced the same issues, so Windows Phone’s honeymoon period was bound to end at some point.

http://twitter.com/yardmanflex yardmanflex

exactly…this happen to every app store..

Milad08

I think the total number is what people care about and what makes sense for marketing reasons.

I would say its ok for the reason that the appstore has become so important to every eco system. I just hope at some point in the future they will be removed again. There were going to be collateral damage anyway at some point. You can’t compete with the NUMBERS if you take care of quality BUT since most people don’t know that you are looking at quality they will think you lack developers.

Anonymous

You know something Milad, most of the people who are complaining about the “quality ” of apps are looking at it strictly from a consumer perspective. You would think with us striving to be in the know with mobile technology your logic and post would’ve sunk in by now.

Eric_sc2

Who cares about the number?

WHERE IS THE TURN-BY-TURN NAVIGATION SOFTWARE (other than Bing) ????????!
………..

Dirtyharry

Jesus Christ man, change the record or buy a Tom Tom. All these features are coming in Mango so give it a rest and wind yer neck in.

Eric_sc2

1) There is absolutely no connection between Mango and Turn-by-Turn. Why are you even talking about Mango here? Silly.
2) The reason why I bought a smartphone is I do not want to buy a Tom Tom. A smartphone is supposed to replace to some extents camera, radio, MP3 player, voice recorder, calculator, etc… Otherwise it is NOT a smartphone, but a dumb phone.
3) Mango, Mango, Mango. It seems to be the sole argument of people without arguments. So if ever I follow you it means I am supposed to wait until 2012 to get a turn-by-turn application. Come on.

http://fxfp.com/ Alex F.

1) Wrong! Turn-by-turn navigation is one of the new features in Mango.
2) Smartphones are generally unsuitable for any serious navigation anyway.
3) You will get it much earlier. Come on.

Anonymous

Garmin Mobile XT on Windows Mobile has excellent turn-by-turn especially on the HD2.

Navigon has pretty-good turn-by-turn and it’s on multiple devices.
Eric_sc2

1) Thanks, but as I said in my original comment, I don’t want Bing Map with Turn-by-Turn navigation, because Bing Map is not working in my country and most Europen countries. Bing Map is unusable. I need a real GPS software. Is it too much to ask?
2) Smartphone are perfectly suitable for serious navigation. I am a biker and I am using a GPS software on my old WinMo for 3 years. I can navigate very efficiently just using TTS. Everything is clear and accurate.
If my old HD2 can do it, I suppose a modern WP7 phone shall be able to do it.
3) Based on the NoDo delay I am not expecting Mango before 2012… Except if MS learn lessons sometimes.
Joriginaloak

eric…..go get yourself an i-phone….you know you want one….go an join the screamin apple fans……you’ll be much happier dude….give us a break too!

Anonymous

Wrong. Mango contains the hooks and various APIs that will allow Nokia to replace Bing Maps in Europe so indeed there is a connection.

Meekermoloko

Sprint has one for free. It works fairly well. Of course, you need to be on Sprint. I think AT&T has something that is a paid service for some reason. Not sure about T-Mobile or other countries outside of the U.S.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=715591433 Barry Allott

I have turn by turn now… Orange Maps is free for Orange users in the UK
bleui

have you try Silver GPS Navigation or Drive On

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_XAN4EDQQQNLLOICYYMSOS3TMUA doni

“Burn them all!”

http://twitter.com/Sharkaat Denis Jelec

KillItWithFire comes to my mind. I’d always have quality over quantity.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_XAN4EDQQQNLLOICYYMSOS3TMUA doni

“Burn them all!”
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_XAN4EDQQQNLLOICYYMSOS3TMUA doni

…the spam apps, I mean!
Meekermoloko

It’s stupid. Most of the apps are pointless on every phone store/market … There needs to be a way to list apps by rating in Zune Marketplace. Top downloads is as close as we’re gonna get right now.

I just want to see more quality apps.

bleui

you might wanna check http://www.senovasolutions.com/Community/WP7/Default.aspx it has rating filter and more, though there isn’t much category to choose from at the moment

Dab

Marketplace is full of rubblish. No use having quantity but not quality. Essential applictions e.g. encryption vault, private sms, block calls, etc, etc are not there. These are familar apps in other OS.

Anonymous

With the current APIs available for the developers to work with its almost impossible to make such apps.. but all these will be available when Mango comes on as developers will have most of these necessary APIs to develop such applications

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=715591433 Barry Allott

All of these apps will dissappear into the darkeness pretty quickly. Once your app is not at the top of the ‘new’ section, all you have is Search and Featured. This is where you need to be strong. but of course advertising helps which will get people to at least trial your app, making you go up the search ranks.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=715591433 Barry Allott

All of these apps will dissappear into the darkeness pretty quickly. Once your app is not at the top of the ‘new’ section, all you have is Search and Featured. This is where you need to be strong. but of course advertising helps which will get people to at least trial your app, making you go up the search ranks.
http://twitter.com/enmoredo Ericson N. Moredo

they are strain in the eye…
Azjerei

Get rid of the crap apps…
http://fxfp.com/ Alex F.

At least Microsoft does not count individual wallpapers and themes as apps (like certain competitors).

http://chmun77.myopenid.com/ Koka

How would you know about that?

Anthony S.

I’m sure many will agree that the Marketplace is polluted with a bunch of apps that should either A) be compounded into one; or B) not even be published. It’s a bunch of rubbish, really, and should be taken care of. I’d much rather have one thousand quality apps than 17,000 crappy ones and a thousand quality ones.
http://chmun77.myopenid.com/ Koka

Forget about the numbers…. Get us the Mango updates already! Apps currently are weak as compared to other rival OSes on WP7!
Hussein Horami

Well, as 90% of the smartphone users buy the argument Apple products has more apps which most of the apps are fart apps, i think Microsoft is allowed to do so too. What i really dont like is that we never get a flashlight app that uses the actual LED flash and not a white screen, how hard can that be? My keychain as a LED light, some crappy Siemens phone i have has a flashlight, why is it so hard to develop?

Anonymous

Actually they are not going to catch up to Apple so it would be far, far smarter to play up quality over quantity and then advertise that. Letting these worthless apps into the store is, to me, the second biggest disappointment in the platform.

John

18,000 apps. Ridiculous. How many of these are actually useful?

Maybe we could start a list of the apps each of us have installed on our phones, and then compare the results to see how many of these 18,000 apps people actually use.

I suspect it would show that we all use a handful of the same ones. Maybe 100 different apps at the most?
awarner

Yep too many useless apps especially those that yopu buy virtual money ie $100 bill for $99.99 are people really that stupid and actually buy this sort of rubbish?
http://twitter.com/Summerclaw Hansel

I rather have a big cheer number of apps. We need this to be comparable with other companies and no go the way of Symbian/WebOS with little third party support. And we still have some pretty darn good apps.
zzz

Once again people here seem clueless about the need for high app count for marketing. Number of crap apps don’t really matter as long as there are plenty of quality apps which WP7 certainly has and will continue have more of. Sure, from WP’s perspective you want to say quality is more important than quantiy. But as the same time, you want to get as many apps as possible (crappy or not) just like ios and android so that when the joe-the-six-pack comes in to a store and compares the OSes by app count, you don’t look like an abandoned platform by saying we have just 1000 apps compared to 300000 for iOS and Android.
Sean

I can think of a few quality apps off the top of my head. To say our platform doesn’t attract high quality developers is an invalid point: Bank of America, eBay, Amazon, WP7 News, Home Depot, Groupon, Twitter, USA Today, The Weather Channel and WeatherBug, etc. Yes, the kinks need to be worked out with Live Tiles and I except all of these apps to gain additional functionality when the new APIs are opened up. I think we have a great start.

Sean

expect*

azimutha

As long as you can find the good ones, I don’t care if MS accepts a bunch of crap apps. Still, it’s amazing that people even bother “creating” them. What is the commercial potential of getting the same info on some Brit MP you could just as well get from mobile Wikipedia?
Alberto Boschi

some developers are lame. there should be an option to block developers.