Microsoft Windows Phone Marketplace celebrates its one year anniversary

After almost one entire year of hearing about Apple and Android, another mobile platform has made some news by turning one year old.  The Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is one year old and today we can learn a little more about the mobile market that just surpassed 40,000 apps.  The marketplace has added about 700 new publishers each month since it was launched back in November of 2010.  Today, the marketplace is available in over 35 countries, but by volume the marketplace is lacking, actually almost 40 percent smaller than iTunes.

The Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is the 5^th largest app store behind Apple, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia.  Some experts say that Microsoft will certainly take some of the market share from those ahead of it, especially Apple, by the year 2015.  When the market launched, about 70 percent of the apps where paid apps and that was the case for the first four months.  By June 2010, there were about 900 more free apps than paid apps available for download.  Then apps started getting booted by Microsoft’s “app spam” policy which rejects developers that added more than 20 similar apps per day.  After June, 1,000 apps were weaned from the app store and instead of stunting growth, total apps actually went up through October.

Throughout the year the paid apps gained about 1,300 apps per month while the free apps grew 1,650 apps per month.  This was nothing compared to the growth of Apple and Android respective app stores, but Microsoft was gaining some popularity in a mobile world where two companies cruised to the top.  Of the top 100 free applications in the marketplace, the category breakdown went as follows: Games, Tools & Productivity, Others, Entertainment, Music & Video, Social and Travel and Navigation.  The top 100 paid applications in the marketplace saw a category breakdown like this:  Games, Tools & Productivity, Others, Entertainment, Travel & Navigation, Music & Video and News& Weather.

Worldwide mobile app downloads from Windows Phone 7 marketplace are led by the United States with over 100,000 free apps downloaded every day and that only includes the top 300 apps.  When compared to the Apple App Store, those numbers are tiny.  Apple say 43 times more free app downloads per day, when looking at the top 300 most downloaded apps.