Marketplace bounds to 19,000 apps in 5 days on influx of spam apps

May 27, 2011 | By Surur

rate-growth

Windows Phone 7 hit 18,000 apps on the 23rd, and now, less than 5 days later, more than 1,200 apps have been added, bringing the current total to 19,283 at the time of writing.

The apps pouring in are not exactly the most differentiated, with Smarter Agent for example seemingly having an app for every neighbourhood in USA.

If there is a silver lining however it is that these are the same apps which have pushed the iPhone app store to over 500,000, and clearly Windows Phone 7 is showing enough momentum to attract the attention of these developers.

If this influx continues we should hit 20,000 apps in a matter of days, which is a nice round number for journalist, some who still think there is only 3000 apps on Marketplace.

Thanks Mark 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

Anonymous

The app store numbers don’t really mean much to me, but im glad that WP’s marketplace is growing; even if has fluff like Android and iOS do.
The sad fact of the matter is that people seem to be gauging quality of an ecosystem on quantity of its applications.
deng mam

Microsoft has to something against these spam apps! these could easily be replaced by one single app, which asks right at the beginning which city/neighboorhood/prominent persons quotes/whatever you want to choose!

zzz

Just ignore them if you don’t need them. Believe it or not, they make those apps to make money. I think they may even be paying MS to test those since you get charged for each submission of free apps after certain count.

deng mam

Try ignoring the trees when you’re in a forest…. i gave up checking the marketplace for new apps, since wmpoweruser mentions mostly if a good app shows up!

Guest

Microsoft not only encourages these apps but in many cases helps the developers in order to up the count.
http://twitter.com/ymala1 Yasir Alam

I like what you suggest but; It is a pain for MS to be as thorough as that I would think, and secondly, while a smaller marketplace with more quality apps is an ideal proposition, and something MS has been alluding to, unfortunately for a lot of people it is numbers, and a lot of these people are the ones that are holding back on WP7 or badmouthing it based on this flawed metric. We see this garbage everywhere, MP vs image quality, clock speeds vs. quality silicon etc

Wellrowe

That number is just impossible. ATM, there are only 19k apps worldwide … even counting inactive ones.
zzz

“If there is a silver lining however it is that these are the same apps which have pushed the iPhone app store to over 500,000, and clearly Windows Phone 7 is showing enough momentum to attract the attention of these developers.”

I see some improvement in your writing there. Now, can we not bitch about those “spam apps” every time we hit a new 1K mark? It’s not like those apps make it harder to find good apps or WP7 is the only platform that gets them. Perhaps you could talk about the number of “non-spam” apps instead?
Anonymous

I do love seeing the number increase, but its pretty poor form for a dev to submit apps like Smarter Agent did imo. Put it in a single application, and have settings for your area.
Peter

Glad that you mentioned the increase is due to spam apps. Too much news like “Marketplace now has over ##### apps!!!” without mention that it has that because of another 1k junk apps. I agree with another poster that we should look at the number of quality apps when judging a marketplace, not the total number.

As for finding good apps, it gets harder when you have so much garbage in the system. I think Deng’s point was good on that. I’ve tried to keep up with the newer apps through an RSS feed, but it’s hard to see the new non-spam apps sometimes because there are so many “Real Estate”, “My MP”, and “Quotes” apps recently. Sure the good apps will rise, but searching is still painful if you just want to see what’s out there.

Maybe MS can have some extra filtering at some point to say “don’t show apps from” or add a rating we can use of “spam” (unlikely) to filter those apps. Haven’t seen how Apple/Google handle this problem, but hoping we get something.
jimski

How do the spam apps not make it harder to find good apps. How do you find apps with names that don’t relate to a search subject. I try to check new apps every day, but last night with this, forget it. Probably let a couple winners slip by.