14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, Microsoft kicked off the 2014 Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC14), where the company revealed some impressive growth numbers for its Windows Phone operating system.
According to the Redmond-based software giant, its mobile operating system grew 91 percent year on year, a rate that makes it the fastest-ascending platform at the moment.
Moreover, the company reveales that Windows Phone is currently the second largest mobile platform on no less than 14 markets out there, where it trails only Google’s Android operating system.
The impressive growth that Windows Phone has seen all around the world also translates into a market share of over 10 percent in 8 countries out there, Microsoft explains.
Furthermore, the company appears confident that its OS will grow even more in the near future, as shipments of devices running under it are already higher than iPhone shipments in 24 regions.
The boost in Windows Phone sales is fueled not only by appealing hardware, but also by an increasingly larger number of mobile applications available for those who choose to grab devices running under the platform.
According to Microsoft, there are 270,000 applications in the Windows Phone Store at the moment, with around 500 new ones being added every day.
Moreover, the company notes that these apps saw over 4 billion downloads to date, and that the number continues to grow.
Apparently, app developers have a lot to gain from this as well, as they saw a 440 percent increase in monthly paid app revenue since the launch of Windows Phone 8.
In fact, chances are that the aforementioned growth will accelerate sooner rather than later, as more mobile phone makers out there are bringing Windows Phone devices to the market.
Presently, the majority of Windows Phone sales are Lumia devices, yet Microsoft announced partnerships with over a dozen handset vendors earlier this year, which will greatly expand the number of available WP handsets before the end of this year.
Not to mention that the company is currently preparing a new OS iteration for release, in the form of Windows Phone 8.1, which landed in a Developer Preview flavor back in April, and which comes with a great deal of enhancements over the previously available one.
Windows Phone 8.1 has already managed to appeal to a lot of users, who chose to install the pre-release version on their devices, and might attract more of them to the platform in the not-too-distant future.