14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since Windows 8 was officially released, Microsoft has been continuously calling for developers to create apps for this particular platform, with the company holding special events in several locations across the globe.
The Windows Store is growing and this isn’t at all surprising, but some important apps are still missing, including official Twitter and Facebook clients.
Leaving all these programs aside and focusing exclusively on the number of apps currently available in the Store, Microsoft will most likely miss its goal of getting 100,000 software solutions in the Store by February 2013.
According to MetroStore Scanner, there are more than 38,000 apps available right now in the Windows Store, with a total of 199 new entries submitted since the last refresh.
While this could be a fairly good number for an operating system released approximately two months ago, a Microsoft executive said back in October that internal forecasts were pointing to more than 100,000 apps in the Store by February this year.
Keith Lorizio, VP, U.S. Sales & Marketing, explained at that time that the number of Windows 8 apps was very likely to grow after general availability. And it did grow, but at a rather slow pace, so it’s almost impossible to get more than 60,000 new apps with just 14 days to go.
In the end, it all comes down to the quality of the apps and not necessarily to their number. But a software developer said the Windows Store is full of spam, with many “ugly” and “useless” entries.
“Windows Store is already awash with thousands of pointless or ugly apps. This makes visibility very difficult. We've seen that in some parts of the world, there's an incentive to bloat the store with quantity, rather than focus on building quality apps,” Lightwood Games CEO Chris Newman said last month.