Microsoft confirms 145,000 Windows Phone apps, indicates massive slow-down

In a post announcing the Nokia Lumia 928, Microsoft also rather casually threw out the fact that the phone will have access to 145,000 apps in the Windows Phone Store, saying:

Pick one up and for a limited time you’ll also get $25 to shop at the Windows Phone Store with 145,000 apps and games

The announcement means Windows Phone has taken nearly 11 months to add 45,000 apps, after Microsoft announced 100,000 apps in June 2012.  The 50,000 apps before this took only 6 months, though the first 50,000 took around 14 months, not far from the rate Windows Phone is adding apps now.

That obviously leaves Windows Phone running at a much slower rate than any major mobile OS,  with Android taking little more than a year to hit 200,000 apps but of course a large number of apps is not an end in itself.  Importantly the number of high profile and high quality apps have increased dramatically in the last 6 months, more driven by the increase in Windows Phone users than anything else.

The slow growth of the store however is a real issue, and Microsoft needs to continue to work at increasing the attractiveness of the market to developers. 

Our first suggestion would be to drop the fee to developers, so developers will not be tempted to withdraw their apps from the store when their yearly $100 renewal comes up, and so the barrier to entry would be even lower.

The next would be to relax style guidelines and release more tools to make porting apps from other mobile operating systems easier.

Lastly would be add support for OpenGL which would make the porting of games easier.

Do our readers agree with the suggestions or have any of your own? Let us know below.