Microsoft Shares WP7 Stats, Takes a Few Jabs at Other Platforms

One year after the initial launch of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft decided to share some stats about the platform on its Windows Phone Developer Blog.

Looking at the cold, hard numbers only, the stats look like this: 11,500 apps for the platform (7,500 are paid apps) and 36,000 developers (with 1,200 newly registered developers every week).

Windows Phone customers download an average of 12 apps each month. It takes 1.8 days, on average, for Microsoft to certify an app, and 62% of apps submitted are certified on their first attempt.

These figures sound solid but are still far behind Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS – for example, there are more than 300,000 apps for the iOS platform as of January 2011, and more than 100,000 apps on the Androidmarket as of October 2010.

Even if you count in the fact that the WP7 is younger than these two platforms, it’s still lagging behind. For example, iOS reached 100,000 apps in 15 months.

However, Microsoft’s Brandon Watson doesn’t really like the methodology used by some other platforms when counting apps.

“We recognize the importance of getting great apps on our platform and not artificially inflating the number of actual apps available to customer by listing “wallpapers” as a category, or perhaps allowing competitor’s apps to run on the platform to increase “tonnage.” We also don’t believe in the practice of counting “lite” apps as unique quality content. (…) Finally, we don’t double and triple count apps which are submitted in multiple languages.,” he explains.