Windows 8 Store Now Offering More than 35,000 Apps

Microsoft’s Windows Store currently provides access to more than 35,000 applications, most of them available with a freeware license, according to new unofficial figures.

While the Redmond-based technology giant remains tight-lipped on the subject and refuses to provide accurate figures when it comes to the number of apps available in the Store, MetroStore Scanner statistics claim there are more than 35,000 programs now available to Windows 8 users.

The United States Store is currently the largest worldwide, as it holds more than 22,000 apps, out of which 18,469 offered with a freeware license. 23 percent of the apps require users to pay for a license.

Even though Microsoft is far from its goal of reaching 100,000 apps in the Store by February 2013, the Windows Store is still recording a fairly impressive growth.

McAkins Online writes that the Windows 8 Store has experienced in only two months the same growth as the Windows Phone platform in an entire year.

But although the Windows Store is growing bigger, it all comes down to the quality of the apps offered to Windows 8 users.

While Microsoft previously said that it’s paying attention to the quality of the apps approved for the Store, a game developer emphasized that Microsoft is actually listing thousands of “ugly” apps.

“Windows Store is already awash with thousands of pointless or ugly apps. This makes visibility very difficult,” Lightwood Games CEO Chris Newman said in an interview earlier this month.

“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.”

Another issue with the Store is that some large companies are refusing to port their apps to Windows 8, including tech giants Google and Facebook. While Google has already released some apps for Microsoft’s new platform, a company official recently revealed that no other similar projects would be unveiled in the near future.

What’s more, Facebook representatives indicated that no official client for Windows 8 is in the works right now, so adopters of the new operating system need to turn to unofficial software.