WP Marketplace: 60,000 items by 15,000 publishers

The Windows Phone Marketplace has grown by 10,000 items in the last 25 days, reaching a total of over 60,000. These are numbers published by All About Windows Phone, indicating that the growth of WP apps has accelerated compared to the months before.

It's not only total numbers that make an app store and mobile ecosystem attractive for users. Good quality of apps and finding the dozen apps most important to you is probably key to deciding for a mobile OS. However, sheer size of a market can be an argument. A lot of people like to have a massive storage rack to choose from - even if they end up with the same handful of products they might also get in the mom-and-pop grocery store next door.

Windows Phone Marketplace growth

Windows Phone has probably just made another step in impressing the quantity-lovers: The Market place has reached a total of over 60,000 apps. The last 10,000 apps were added in only 25 days. That is a lot quicker than the prior 10,000, which took 40 days.

2011 has seen mentionable growth in the number of WP7 apps. By now, there are over 60,000. (Graph: AAWP)

Speaking in apps-per-day, the rate of submissions continues to increase, with an average of 400 items added per day. This indicates a rather lively developer community. While publishers and developers numbers don't always have to correlate, the number of 15,000 WP7 publishers points in a similar direction.

Let's compare.

To put WP7s 60,000 apps into context, using Distimo US data from November: There were about 440,000 iPhone apps in the US App Store and close to 350,000 apps in the Android Market. The Nokia Ovi store and the BlackBerry World had about 50,000 apps each - the number WP7 had reached about two months later.

App store comparision by Distimo - as of November 2011

Quantifying quality: 4,000 apps

As the guys over at All About Windows Phone are also aware that quantity isn't everything, they have tried to somehow, well, quantify quality.

"Looking at how many times an app has been rated can provide some guidance here, as only applications and games seen as useful are likely to be downloaded and rated multiple times. In the Windows Phone Marketplace 4,052 apps have been rated 5 or more times."

So this might be the number of WP7 apps really used. While this metric was just introduced, it might be interesting to see how it develops over time.

See also:
3 billion: One out of five iOS downloads was an iPad app
Mobile apps & stores - What happened in 2011?
Holiday season boosted app downloads to 1.2 billion