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.

Source:

Tags: growth, marketplace, Trolling, WP7

Category: Nokia