Windows Phone Marketplace passes 50,000 apps
The Windows Phone Marketplace has now passed the 50,000 app and games submission mark. Content is being added at the rate of 265 items per day. At the time of writing, 50,126 items have been published. Of these, 17,276 were added …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Marketplace has roughly quintupled inside a single year: it stood at 10,000 apps back in March, and the August decision to open submissions for Mango (30,000 apps at that point) supplied the developer pipeline behind the current 265-items-per-day pace.
Two earlier stories frame what kind of 50,000 this is: Microsoft's September crackdown on app spam, capping developers at ten submissions a day was an explicit attempt to keep catalog growth from turning into clutter, while November coverage highlighted how much of the catalog is free rather than paid content.
First-order effects
- Microsoft gains its clearest counterargument yet to the 'app gap' criticism against Windows Phone, with a published catalog of 50,126 items heading into 2012.
- Developers now face a marketplace adding 265 items daily, raising the discoverability bar for new submissions even as the store grows.
Second-order effects
- Rival platform holders face pressure to publicize their own catalog velocity, since raw submission counts have become the de facto scoreboard for third-party ecosystem health.
- With free content dominating the mix per the November reporting, paid-app pricing on Windows Phone comes under pressure as developers compete for visibility in a fast-filling store.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, app-catalog size hardens into the standard metric by which mobile platforms are judged viable, forcing every ecosystem player to subsidize developer volume regardless of quality or revenue per app.
The trend: Mobile platform competition in 2011-2012 is increasingly fought on app-catalog scale, with Windows Phone compressing the 10,000-to-50,000 climb into nine months.