14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's struggle to bring more apps in its stores and convince developers to port programs to modern Windows platforms more or less seems to pay off if we have a look at a new bunch of statistics published by the company on the “Microsoft by the Numbers” website.
At this point, there are 525,000 apps in the Windows Phone and Windows stores, Microsoft says, and “hundreds more are added every day,” Redmond explains, suggesting that its modern platforms are finally gaining ground and more developers discover the opportunity of finding a growing audience.
Back in October 2012, when Microsoft officially introduced Windows 8, the operating system launched with approximately 5,000 apps in the store, a number that was obviously below what the company expected to get for a modern platform that was supposed to change “the way we work on our computers.”
There are currently nearly 350,000 apps in the Windows Phone Store and around 190,000 apps in the Windows Store, some of which could run on both tablets and smartphones and fall in the “universal apps” category announced by Microsoft at BUILD this year.
As VentureBeat reports, both the Windows and the Windows Phone stores are far behind rivals. The Google Play Store currently has 1.3 million apps available for the store, while Apple's App Store reached the same figure in September, so Microsoft's stores have less than half apps.
Microsoft could merge the two stores
Word has it that Microsoft might actually merge the Windows Phone with the Windows stores in the next Windows release, which could take place in spring 2015.
Microsoft merged the developer accounts for the two stores late last year, which was pretty much the first step towards such a significant change, but it also paved the road for the universal app concept that was introduced earlier this year at BUILD.
Universal apps can run on both phones and tablets and if you purchase one version, you get access to all of them if you log in with the same Microsoft account. This is actually the core of Microsoft's future stores, as the company hopes that, with a possible store merger, more such apps capable of running on all devices powered by Windows would be released by devs.
Windows 10 could see daylight in spring 2015, people close to the matter suggest, while Windows Phone 10 might be introduced at about the same time if development goes according to the plan.
