The Windows 8 Windows Store is growing bigger ahead of public debut

Oct 11, 2012 07:22 GMT  ·  By

The Windows 8 Windows Store has finally managed to jump the 4,000 app threshold only two weeks ahead of the new operating system’s public debut.

WinAppUpdate.com reports that Windows Store currently provides access to a total of 4,326 apps, out of which 3,783 are delivered with a freeware license.

Surprisingly, the Windows Store is now growing very fast, with one record day that brought Microsoft’s software repository a total of 351 apps. The average number of submitted entries however remains at 100 apps per day, the site reports.

Just as it happened before, 88 percent of the apps are free, with the “Games” category still holding the leading spot with 18 percent of the total number of listed apps.

While analysts emphasize that the Windows Store needs at least 5,000 apps at launch, a milestone that’s very likely to be reached in the next two weeks, a Microsoft executive says that the company has a much more optimistic goal.

Microsoft expects to see Windows Store growing up to 100,000 apps by February, with many more apps to be added to the Store after the public launch of the operating system.

Keith Lorizio, VP, U.S. Sales & Marketing, said in an interview that Microsoft expects the number of apps submitted to the Windows Store to skyrocket after October 26 before eventually reaching a record 100,000 in February.

“We’re expecting to aggressively pursue over 100,000 apps over the first three months,” the Microsoft exec said in the interview with Beet.TV.

“Now as soon as Windows 8 goes live on Oct. 26, the marketplace - the available marketplace - is a billion plus consumers. And in order to reach our goal, which is a conservative estimate of 400 million units in marketplace by July 1, we know that we have to have a very very healthy ecosystem of apps. And we’re putting millions of dollars against that effort and working with publishers to get their apps live as quickly as possible.”