In an interview with MobiFrance, Microsoft France’s product manager for Windows Mobile, Audrey Zolghadr, says that Microsoft intends to launch the Windows Marketplace for Mobile with at least 600 apps. Is that good?
The iPhone app store has over 20,000, but maybe 100 useful ones. The Palm App Catalog had so few apps at launch it was almost laughable. RIM’s AppWorld launched with about a thousand apps and just announced it had doubled to 2,000. There’s got to be over 20K Windows Mobile apps out there already… yes? 600 good apps would be nice, and a very respectable start. Lots of major developers have signed on so far, which bodes well for quality, and the sheer number of Windows Mobile devices out there suggests that once many of the uncertified apps go through the MS process, they may also appear in the Marketplace.
With everyone putting out their own app store (our sibling BlackBerry Cool recently launched the BlackBerry Cool App World by Mobihand to compete with RIM’s AppWorld) - what will it take to make one dominant? Sheer quantity of apps? A handful of killer apps? Let me know what you think!
I’m hopeful. WinMo definitely has more than 20k apps out there but in that, I would say that it’s a bit overkill — making it hard to find decent apps in the mass.
Maybe having an official MS app store will help by putting the job of finding the good apps on MS… from developers — official MS ones or otherwise.
I’d like to see 600 concentrated killer apps from the more than 20k out there but I’m expecting more like 300 killer apps, which is still pretty impressive if you ask me.