Windows Phone 7 Marketplace growing, but still tiny

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 24 November 2011 12:27

Your IT - Mobility

The Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is now one year old. While it is growing, download volumes are still a small fraction of those from Apple's App Store for iOS devices.

According to app market research firm Distimo, the number of apps available in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is growing at the rate of 1300 paid and 1650 free apps per month.

But download volumes are still relatively small. The biggest Marketplace is in the US, where the top 300 apps generate just 101,000 free downloads and 20,000 paid downloads per day. That's 39 times smaller than the volume seen in the Apple App Store for iPhone alone (ie, ignoring iPad apps), according to Distimo.

There are slightly more free apps than paid in the Marketplace, and Distimo estimates that only 4000 downloads per day actually generate revenue from the US Marketplace. All of the top 10 paid downloads in the US are games, with Angry Birds leading the pack. While there are six games among the top free apps in the Marketplace, the first four spots are taken by YouTube, Adobe Reader, Facebook and Free Music Downloader.

In Australia and the US, games account for 50% of the top 100 free apps, compared with 15-20% in Brazil, South Korea, Norway and The Netherlands.

Distimo provided interesting insight regarding the international distribution of Windows Phone apps. There is much less overlap between countries for popular free apps than there is for paid ones. The company suggests two factors are at work: free apps may be more local in nature, and developers are more motivated to make paid apps available in multiple countries.