125,000 Apps In Windows Phone Market

With just a few days left before Windows 8 launch event,WP Market has passed a milestone.More than 125,000 apps have now been published in the Windows Phone Marketplace and new content is currently being added at the rate of 215 apps per day. At the time of writing, 126,530 apps have been published, of which 113,170 are available for download (live). Of these, 15,822 were added in the last three months and 5,673 were added in the last month. These apps come from just over 30,000 different publishers.

Key points

As of October 22nd, 2015:

• 126,530 apps were published to the Windows Phone Marketplace over the last 20 months

• 113,170 apps are live (publicly listed as available for download, total across 60 countries)
• 101,517 apps are live in the US Marketplace
• Windows Phone reached the 125,000 milestone faster than Android (26 months), but slower than iOS (18.5 months)
• 30,000 developers have published an app in the Marketplace
• Proportion of quality apps (rated five or more times) stable in the UK at 7.8% (8% in May), increasing in the US at 13.8% (12% in May).

The graph below shows the growth in the total number of apps (content items) published to the Windows Phone Marketplace over the last 24 months.

In common with other application stores, the total number of published items is not the same as the number of items available to consumers. Of the 126,530 items published to the Marketplace, 11,639 are no longer available (withdrawn by Microsoft or unpublished by the developer), a further 1,716 items are in staging (awaiting an update, in beta or not live for some other reason). That means there are 113,170 apps currently available for download (live) on the Windows Phone Marketplace.

In addition, some apps are only available in select markets. This means the number of available items to a consumer, in a given market, is lower than the number of published items. The current figures for live apps (i.e. fully available for download) are: US (101,517), UK (96,265), France (92,887), Spain (91,224), Italy (90,806), Germany (91,940), Australia (92,670), Russia (75,728), Brazil (65,360) India (92,130) and China (46,094).

It's notable that both China and India have enjoyed stronger than average growth since our previous report, perhaps indicative of strong sales of low cost devices, such as the Lumia 610.

The graph below shows the number of live apps available in 59 countries. The 5 groupings visible in the chart align, roughly, with the date at which the country went live in the Marketplace. The five groups are Windows Phone launch (October 2010), Mango launch (October 2011), Expansion 3 (January 2015), Expansion 4 (March 2015), and Expansion 5 (April 2015).

Some apps are only distributed in a single country. This usually applies to apps that contain region-restricted content or features, are hyper-local (only relevant to one country) or are only available in a single language. The chart below shows the number of single market distribution apps for each country. As you might expect the US leads the way (2854), with China in second place (1558), indicating a strong "local" app presence.  Other apps are distributed in multiple countries, but not all the countries are available in the Marketplace. Developers with such apps may be missing out on potential downloads.

In September, the last full month for which data is available, an average of 215 apps were added to Windows Phone Marketplace per day. This was down from earlier in the year, but more than double the number from September 2011 2011 (97 per day). The app addition rate has fallen over the middle months of 2015, perhaps as developers look ahead to Windows Phone 8, but the overall trend sees an increasing growth rate from 2011 to 2015.

The chart below shows the proportion of content in each of the Windows Phone Marketplace's top level categories. Entertainment remains the the single biggest category (23,735 items). The next three biggest categories are tools + productivity (18,465), games (15,501) and books + reference (14,491 items).


Of the top four categories, Games is showing the fastest growth having overtaken books + reference for third place since our May report. The four biggest categories (out of seventeen) make up 58% of the content. 

The pie chart below shows the breakdown of the game section by sub-category (in the Windows Phone Marketplace, games has the most sub-categories, by some distance). The most popular sub-category is puzzle + trivia (5,225 games - 34%), followed by action + adventure (2,354 games - 15%) and classics (2,160 games - 14%).

69% of items in the Windows Phone Marketplace are free, 10% are paid with a free trial and 22% are paid. In the last few months, there has been a small increase in the proportion of free apps, continuing the trend of the last 12 months. The wider availability of advertising SDKs for Windows Phone and an increasing willingness, by developers, to try ad-supported business models is the primary reason for this.

Unfortunately for Windows Phone users,  the rate at which apps are being published to the Windows Phone Marketplace has slowed down in recent months. This is likely because developers are preparing for the launch of Windows Phone 8.

Letterpress Game Review

If you’ve used the Twitter client Tweetie or the official Twitter apps for iOS, Android and OS X, you have one person to thank for them: Loren Brichter. Brichter rose to fame with his excellent Twitter app, Tweetie, for iOS and Android. These apps were so good that Twitter acquired him and his apps and since then he made the Twitter apps for iPhone, iPad, Android and OS X.




Last year, Brichter left Twitter to continue working for his own company, Atebits. He has been secretly working on his own app since then and yesterday it was finally released on iOS. Say hello to Letterpress.

Letterpress is a two player, online multiplayer game similar to Scrabble, where you have a grid of 5×5 tiles consisting of letters. Your goal is to form words using these letters. The word should have at least two characters and you cannot repeat words. Once you select your letters, they get assigned by your team color. The opponent then has to do the same.

If you choose from the white tiles, that is those that have not been used, you get one point per tile. If you steal tiles from your opponent, you get one point and the opponent loses one point per tile. Once stolen, the tiles turn the color of your side. If you use your own previously used tiles, you don’t get any points. Eventually, you have to use up all the tiles on the board and the one with the highest score wins.

The premise is pretty simple but despite that the game is fun to play. What I really like about this game is how well made it is. From the UI design to the slick animations, everything is top-notch and shows that a great deal of care went into making the game.

Now here’s the best part: Letterpress is completely free for download. There is an upgrade option for which you have to pay $0.99. which lets you use various themes for the board and you can also play multiple games at the same time but even without upgrading the game feels complete.

Click here to download the game on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. You’ll need a Game Center ID to play the game.

Droid DNA

 Verizon is one of the more common proponents of silly Android device names, in part through its insistence on that "Droid" prefix for some hardware. When its smartphone badges practically demand a pause for breath, you know there's a problem. Android Central's purported copy of a Minimum Advertised Pricing list could show that there's hope for the carrier yet. The chart shows the HTC DLX (6435LVW) skipping the rumored Droid Incredible X name in favor of Droid DNA -- and that's it. No superlatives, no arbitrary "4G LTE" tags to remind us of the network we already know we're using. The 5-inch phone might have even been a reasonable launch, as the MAP shows a $200 contract price that would potentially take effect just before Thanksgiving.

Want more? Other smartphones are on the supposedly leaked MAP list as well, primarily focusing on Windows Phone 8 gear: the as yet unconfirmed Nokia Lumia 822 shows up with a $100 price and a mid-November release window, while Verizon's take on the Windows Phone 8X is present with a $200 price and similar timing. Those who'd rather go for a Samsung phablet than HTC's aren't left out, either. The Verizon edition of the Galaxy Note II is on the list with a $300 price and availability that starts immediately -- rather convenient, that.

Pics From Lumia 820 Leaked

       The pics are taken with he 8 MP unit on the back of the Nokia Lumia 820, which Nokia says has overhauled software algorithms compared to the ones it is using in the Lumia 900.The picture is apparently of an office building, and the source says his prototype unit didn't allow him to take anything with higher resolution, or he couldn't find a way to switch from the settings, which were obviously in the "email resolution" position.

Alleged camera sample from the Nokia Lumia 820 emerges

Ipad Mini Ignores Thumb Resting On Display

When Apple announced the iPad mini, one of the things I noticed was how thin the bezel is on the side. The iPad has a sizable bezel all around its display and Apple’s reason for that was to be able to hold the device without touching the screen. So why did they make the bezel so thin on the iPad mini?

At first glance it seems like a major design gaffe but turns out, it’s not. Because the bezel on the iPad mini is so thin on the sides, the software has been designed to ignore your thumb even if you rest it directly on the display.
This works similar to the way the MacBook multi-touch trackpad or the Magic Mouse works. On either of these devices, you can have one finger on the touch surface and continue to scroll or tap using the other finger and the software is smart enough to ignore the resting finger and just accept the input from the moving finger.
The iPad mini uses similar sorcery to cancel out the inputs from your thumb resting on the side and only accept the inputs from your other fingers. This has allowed Apple to significantly reduce the size of the bezel, which makes the device easier to hold in one hand and the display also looks bigger than it actually is (bezels tend to make the screen look tiny).

Ipad Mini-Worth The Price?

Leading up to the reveal of the iPad mini, we put a lot of thought into just how Apple might see fit to price the tablet in its lineup of other iOS devices. Now that the iPad mini is official, along with its $329 starting price, some people have been wondering if that might actually be too steep a price for the tablet, considering what you get for it. Apple exec Phil Schiller is unsurprisingly not among them, and spoke to reporters about why he feels the $329 sticker is appropriate.

Reuters specifically asked about what impact the $329 tag may have on shoppers who are out to get a budget-priced tablet, instead of the type of consumer who routinely buys $500 iPads each year, as new ones arrive. Schiller seems to think that shoppers will appreciate the value of the iPad mini when they compare its cost to those of full-sized iPads. He offers the fact that users still bought regular iPads even when $200 7-inch Androids were readily available as support for why the mini’s pricing will succeed.

Do you think Schiller has a point here, or is he failing to understand consumer behavior? Won’t there be a good number of shoppers this holiday season so focused on price that they may not be able to appreciate the subtleties of the difference in user experience between a Nexus 7 and the iPad mini? Did Apple make a mistake by failing to make iPad mini pricing even more competitive than it did?

Lumia 920 Teardown

Nokia’s Lumia 920 is just around the corner, and as we look forward to the Windows Phone 8 handset finally arriving, we get the opportunity to take an in-depth look at the phone’s hardware, thanks to a detailed teardown of the phone, along with the leak of a nice exploded view of its assembly.

Supposedly sourced from a Nokia service manual, these pictures give us a great look into all the components that come together to create the Lumia 920. Don’t expect much in the way of surprises here, but it’s still a great chance to see part of the phone that we’ve been hearing so much about, like the inductive coil on the phone’s rear cover that provides it its wireless charging abilities.