Windows Phone Marketplace Hits 10K Apps Mark

Windows Phone 7 users out there now have at their disposal a number of no less than 10,000 applications available for download via the Windows Phone Marketplace.

When considering the fact that the new Windows Phone 7 platform and the software portal that accompanies it were launched in October 2010 with under 1,000 apps available, the milestone seems pretty impressive.

Even more, it appears that Microsoft's portal of mobile applications is the fastest growing on the market.

The Windows Phone Marketplace is said to be the one to reach the 10k apps first, followed closely by Apple's App Store.

It took only 4.5 months for the Marketplace to reach this milestone, while the Apple App Store required 4.7 months for that. For comparison purposes, we should note that the Android Market reached this limit after 11 months.

About one third of the applications in the Marketplace are free, while about half of the paid ones come with trial versions, it seems.

Last week, Microsoft announced that the Marketplace has a number of 32,000 registered developers, which come up with about 100 apps every day.

At this pace, the storefront would be able to add the next 10,000 applications in about three months from now.

The Redmond-based software giant also announced that its Windows Phone Developer Tools registered more than one million downloads.

The company has been focused on offering update tool to app developers, and the latest release they came up with introduced support for new features in the OS, such as copy and paste.

Some of the last year's analyst forecasts suggested that the Marketplace would be able to become one of the top three app stores in the world in the near future, and it seems that things have already started to move in this direction.

More applications are expected to become available for Windows Phone 7 as the platform reaches more markets, and new features are included into the mix via software updates.