How many people do you know that have the Windows Phone operating system on their handset? Probably not many.
But that has real potential to change if you look at the strong growth of the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. The OS’s developer’s blog says the Marketplace is about to hit the 30,000 app mark. That doesn’t sound like many compared to the hundreds of thousands now available from the Android Market and the Apple App Store, until you consider this: It’s only taken eight months. That’s the same amount of time it took Apple to reach 30,000, and it’s twice as fast reaching that milestone compared to Android, which took 17 months.
And app development over at Microsoft just got a little more interesting. The Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, which launched in November 2010, also announced that it will start to accept and certify Mango apps from developers. “This means that new and existing titles optimized for Mango features like fast app switching, background audio, multiple and double sided Live Tiles, better Search integration and more will begin publishing in a matter of days," the developer site says.
There are only a handful of Windows Phone handsets on the market, so it’s no wonder that uptake has been slow. But many expect Microsoft’s big partnership with Nokia will help the young operating system take off this fall. Nokia this month announced it is pulling Symbian-based phones from the North American market in preparation for the launch of its Windows Phone 7 devices. Combine that with an exciting future in app development, and Windows Phone might be able to make a go of it, even though Android devices and the iPhone are the current rulers of the smartphone OS world.
IDC research released in June went as far to predict that once we start seeing a glut of Nokia/Windows Phone devices in 2012, the new Microsoft OS – combined with its predecessor, Windows Mobile – will account for a remarkable 20 percent of global market share as soon as 2015.
