Windows Phone Marketplace passes 50,000 apps

The Windows Phone Marketplace has now passed the 50,000 app and games submission mark. Content is being added at the rate of 265 items per day. At the time of writing, 50,126 items have been published. Of these, 17,276 were added in the last 90 days and 8,010 were added in the last 30 days. These items come from 13,002 different publishers.The 50,000 mark, which has been reached sooner than we estimated, is a key milestone, but more important is the accelerating growth of the Marketplace. It took just over a year to get to 40,000 apps, but just 40 days to add the next 10,000 apps. That bodes well for Windows Phone in 2012.Number of Content Items (Apps) PublishedThe graph below shows the growth in the total number of applications published to the Windows Phone Marketplace over the last year.Growth of Windows Phone Marketplace. Note: December 2011 is not complete. Figures up to December 27th.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 Of the 50,126 items published to the Marketplace, just under 6,000 are no longer available (removed by Microsoft or withdrawn by the publisher). 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 approximate figures are: US (42,655), UK (40,305), France (39,235), Spain (37,027), Italy (36,944), Germany (36,958), Australia (37,024), India (36,752) and Singapore (36,922). During the last four weeks, an average of around 265 new content items has been added each day. When the Marketplace reached 40,000 items (November 16th 2011) this rate was 165 items per day, which means the rate of addition is accelerating.Apps and Games added each week to Windows Phone Marketplace.The last few weeks have seen an acceleration in the rate of submissions. There are two likely causes here: firstly the expanded availability of the Windows Phone Marketplace geographically (extended from 16 to 35 countries) and secondly the release of Nokia's first Windows Phone devices. Content by category and licenseThe chart below shows the proportion of content in each of the Windows Phone Marketplace's top level categories. Entertainment is the single biggest category (7,543 items). The next three biggest categories are books + reference (7,014 items), games (6,991) and tools + productivity (6797 items). The four biggest categories (out of seventeen) make up 57% of the content.Table showing number of items by category and license (free, paid, paid with trial) type:Note: Some items are not included in this table due to missing category data. All percentages are approximate.Category Free Paid Paid with Trial Total Items % of toal Items % of total Items % of total ItemsTotals 26234 58% 13010 29% 6381 14% 49305 books + reference 1293 18% 4931 70% 501 7% 7014business 760 72% 170 16% 102 10% 1058education 933 77% 209 17% 68 6% 1213entertainment 5235 69% 1556 21% 588 8% 7543personal finance 526 53% 222 22% 161 16% 988games 3591 51% 1411 20% 1746 25% 6991government + politics 77 84% 11 12% 4 4% 92health + fitness 705 50% 431 31% 250 18% 1412kids + family 193 57% 72 21% 73 22% 339lifestyle 1479 44% 378 11% 258 8% 3366music + video 636 63% 188 19% 157 16% 1003news + weather 2817 70% 304 8% 165 4% 4050photo 352 47% 168 22% 216 29% 750social 985 70% 231 16% 159 11% 1408sports 1140 62% 445 24% 216 12% 1826tools + productivity 4157 61% 1317 19% 1182 17% 6797travel + navigation 1355 39% 966 28% 535 15% 3455 58% of items in the Windows Phone Marketplace are free, 14% are paid with a free trial and 29% are paid. By comparison, the free / paid ratio for Android is approximately 69% / 31% and for iOS is approximately 43% / 57%.Comparison with Android and iOSBoth Android and iOS (both 500,000+) have at least ten times more apps available than Windows Phone. However, this metric is, for obvious reasons, strongly correlated to how long an app store has been in operation. A more interesting comparison is to look at their relative performance.Windows Phone has taken just under 14 months to reach the 50,000 milestone. Android took 19 months (October 2008 - April 2010) to reach 50,000 apps, reflecting Android's relatively slow start in terms of device licensees. iOS took 12 months (July 2008 - June 2009) to reach the same figure, but arguably had an advantage, given it had an installed based of around 4 million first generation iPhones before the App Store launched.This relative comparison would suggest Windows Phone Marketplace is a credible challenger to both Apple's App Store and Google's Marketplace in terms of app metrics.AboutThese numbers are from our own tracking system, which is also used to power the All About Windows Phone Apps & Games section, where you can browse all of the applications and games, and install them via links to Zune Desktop, the web-based Marketplace, or install them directly by scanning the QR Code with Bing Vision on your smartphone.If you're interested in getting additional insight or more detailed data, please get in touch and ask about the AAWP App Tracking service.