Windows Phone 7: A year on – less of a failure than you think.
The folks at Windows Phone Developer Blog have been kind enough to put together a list of all the significant number, statistics and observations made since Microsoft’s announcements MIX 2010 concerning the Windows Phone 7 application development framework and tools. Quite a bit of it is surprising to me especially with so much talk about it being a dead platform and the supposed lack of a future for developers or others. (*looks at fanboys briefly*)
Key statistics:
The Windows Phone Developer tools have been downloaded 1.5 million times since their availability. (For reference, the Nokia Qt SDK was downloaded 1.5 Million times in ~6 months) a substantial rate of uptake regardless of how you slice it.
36,000 developers who have PAID to join the AppHub community in order to publish their applications to the Windows Phone Marketplace.
1200 new developers joining the community per week.
11,500 applications available in the store, wallpapers and other content items do not factor into the equation. Further, ebooks account for a minuscule number of the applications counted.
Developers get very fast feedback on their applications passing QA by Microsoft, on average 1.8 days as opposed to weeks or months in rival stores.
Trial versions are available for 44% of the 7500 paid applications available in the store.
40% of all developers have published an application to the Marketplace.
Of course, some of these figures will pale in comparison to even the somewhat inflate Ovi Store growth and statistics, it’s important to note that with even more limited reach, limited marketshare and an utter lack of “halo” devices to generate buzz, Windows Phone 7 has garnered significant interest in the developer sphere.
Of course this means little as far as Nokia is concerned, we may not even begin to the see the transition to Windows Phone 7 moving in earnest until 2012 when Symbian is deprecated. I still believe however, that this move to Windows Phone 7 will be mutually beneficial for both parties, especially when one considers the growing importance of NFC and location-based services.
Category: Nokia
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Windows can run on Nokia N900?
Windows 95 maybe
yeah 95′s UI=wp7
And Symbian’s UI = DOS?
Trollers gotta troll, right?
k accepted. but wp7=95
Nice stats from the PR guys. Now the facts: http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/69061.aspx?PageIndex=14 .
Let me get my hand out of Steve’s arse to write a reply (as suggested by Tinkle/Roger and such that I’m a blatant fanboy of WP)
The forum you show is proof, no matter what I say it is probably true. However, what is often forgotten is that WP7 isn’t launched worldwide officialy.
For a very large slice of the entire market app purchasing isn’t available.
The primary factor is that you need a US based Credit Card to be able to purchase apps. Marketplace isn’t supported officialy in my country yet.
Besides that, there are only a few country variants of WP7 yet. By that I mean available languages. There are enough people who won’t buy a phone if it isn’t in their native language.
Uptake and succes of WP7 can’t be judged now when comparing to other OS’es that are available worldwide. In about a year or so when availablity is broader than comparing makes sense.
hello, i bought an htc hd7,i live in israel. i can get an israeli american express card will that work? thanks in advance.
My point is that WP7 isn’t the developer’s heaven as it could be suggested by those stats and a lot of them are already moving to other platforms. Even Bada is actually more interesting from a developer’s point of view.
Can Nokia change this situation? Maybe.
still though.. encouraging figures.. but what they have left out is..
are these new devlopers any good
who wants to buy an app for an inflated price when it can be had for less on another platform? (especially if the plan is to push the devices to lower price points)
are these registered devlopers just porting other apps, if so i refer you to the above point.
It’s one thing having the structure in place. it’s another getting people to part with their money – worldwide or not worldwide. If it’s not crushingg it’s competitors in it’s home countries – what’s going to happen in the rest of the world.. suddenly everyone loves it? don’t think so.
Here’s the most important stat: Microsoft had sold just 2M WP7 licenses as of January and hasn’t had anything to say since then. That’s not the number of devices that have been sold to customers, mind you, just licenses to manufacturers. The 2M number is absolutely awful when you consider that this was Microsoft’s grand re-entry to the mobile market and that it came with a huge splash.
Recall that Microsoft launched on dozens of carriers across the globe, has fully subsidized prices, has heavy carrier tie-in advertising, receives a lot of ongoing press, has a huge Microsoft advertising budget and there are numerous very large manufacturers selling a variety of models. And it only sold 2M units.
That’s extremely bad, guys. It looked like it was ramping up modestly into the holidays but all evidence since then seems to suggest that consumers aren’t interested.
IMO, this is the ship that will sink Nokia, not rescue it. I very much look forward to hearing Microsoft’s sales numbers when they release them next – I expect them to be quite poor.
Microsoft will probably never release sales figures. Everyone should know that when Microsoft releases numbers they are always misleading, you always have to watch their wordings and read their PR like a lawyer…
“36,000 developers who have PAID to join the AppHub community in order to publish their applications to the Windows Phone Marketplace.”
This statement more than likely refers the Microsoft AppHub which of course is for producing apps for WP7 AND XBOX live indie games, go to the website read for yourself. You pay to join AppHub and you can make apps and games for XBOX live and WP7. The new developers joining every week seems to be in the same vein.
Microsoft was faced with the challenge of making WP7 sound successful with numbers. This is what they came up with. Anyone who believes that there is a huge amount of developer support for an OS that a company won’t release sales for and by estimation accounts for around 3% of smartphones in the US and less internationally is an absolute fool.
this blog goes down badly.
Yeah it’s such a success that the WP7 phones lost about 40-50% of their retail sales price within less than 6 months… Omnia 7 16 GB (aka WP7 flagship device) is now down to 250 EUR (incl. 19% VAT), while the Android variant still is 400 €….
Now there are 12500 Apps in the marketplace
I’m going to enjoy this
Just wonder how many of that 36000 “developers” are MS employers…
http://www.mobiletechworld.com/2010/07/22/microsoft-urges-its-employees-to-develop-windows-phone-7-applications-in-their-spare-time/