One of the main reasons Microsoft is unifying Windows Phone and Windows is to create a larger market place for Windows phone developers creating modern apps.
Some data has leaked today which explains just how dire the Windows Phone Store situation really is, with data from the top apps in the platform being leaked to website Gizmara.
According to their leak the top app on Windows Phone is predictably Facebook, and that app has been downloaded a total of 112 million times since its first release on Windows Phone 7.
Given that just about every Windows Phone owner would have downloaded the app at least once per handset, the number gives us a good idea of the size of the Windows Phone community (and tallies remarkably well with our estimate of how many Windows Phones have ever been sold). Facebook is followed by WhatsApp, which has a total of 92,228,211 downloads and Microsoft’s own OneDrive app with 62,454,521 downloads. Microsoft’s other apps, Travel, Sports, Money and Health & Fitness has a bit more than 20 million users.
Its all downhill from there, with other apps like eBay (5,783,373), Telegram (2,545,063), BBM (4,050,654) Vine (5,080,520) and PayPal (1,572,527) having relatively insignificant numbers.
Some smaller ISV do better than the giant companies, like Tube HD (13,000,748), gMaps (7,820,356), Fhotoroom (6,275,602) and 6tag(4,094,053), but all other apps have less than 2 million downloads, or even less than 1 million.
Some high profile (paid only, no trial) apps do even worse, such as Minecraft (163,411), and GTA San Andreas (40,167).
Even paid apps with large numbers of downloads as trials had only few purchases. Fhotoroom (previously paid, now free) has 6.2 million downloads, but sold only around 1,500 copies. Around 10% of myTube’s downloads converted to sales, which is of course pretty good. Assassin’s Creed only converted 3% of its trail users to paid users.
The numbers explain why Microsoft urgently needed to expand the usage base of their apps, as such small numbers would never support a robust developer ecosystem. Hopefully with the changes in Windows 10 we will see actual adoption of modern apps by desktop users, and a spill-over benefit to the phone side as intended.
Files with the leaked details can be found at Gizmara here.