Microsoft now has over 100 active apps on iOS and Android, excluding Skype and Yammer apps, as it expands its presence on multiple platforms
Don't look now, but Microsoft has more than 100 iOS and Android apps — As Microsoft works on revamping its underperforming Windows Phone platform …
Context & Ripple Effects
In early 2015, Microsoft's mobile strategy looked like triage: with Windows Phone underperforming, the company was instead building out an enormous portfolio on rival platforms — over 100 active iOS and Android apps, Skype and Yammer excluded. Two months later, coverage of Microsoft's long list of iOS apps framed the count as a deliberate commitment to the platform, not a hedge.
That reading proved correct: by Build 2017 Microsoft was openly conceding iOS and Android's dominance and repositioning its mobile work as extending Windows experiences onto those platforms. The 100-app milestone was the opening move of that pivot — reach first, platform second.
First-order effects
- Windows Phone loses its last differentiating argument: with Microsoft's own productivity and services apps shipping natively on iOS and Android, buyers get most of the Microsoft experience without a Windows device.
- Microsoft's engineering effort splits across three mobile codebases, with iOS and Android clearly resourced ahead of its own platform while the Windows Phone revamp continues.
Second-order effects
- Rival ecosystems absorb Microsoft's distribution at no cost — Apple and Google gain a deeper app catalog and more sticky productivity use cases, strengthening exactly the duopoly Microsoft is depending on.
- Microsoft shifts its monetization center of gravity toward subscriptions and cloud services attached to those apps, since the apps themselves are now free advertising rather than OS lock-in.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Microsoft's mobile business decouples entirely from Windows: the corpus later shows Word passing a billion Android installs and Office consolidating into one cross-platform app suite, culminating in the unified Office app combining Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — an OS-agnostic services company using any phone as its endpoint.
The trend: Microsoft's 2015 app-count surge is the first data point in its decade-long conversion from a platform-defending OS company into a cross-platform services vendor that treats iOS and Android as primary distribution.