Microsoft Mobile System Builds App Catalog to 50,000

As T-Mobile gets ready to bring the Nokia Lumia 710 smartphone to its lineup, the Microsoft system at the core of the device has seen its app store grow to 50,000 available apps. This is the number of apps published, and there have been around 6,000 apps pulled by the developers or Microsoft for a variety of reasons, the tech blog All About Windows Phone reports.

The Windows Phone Marketplace has hit the 50,000 app mark in 14 months; it took Android 19 months to get to 50,000, while iOS took 12 months. That means the Windows Phone system is growing. When the Marketplace reached 40,000 apps, nearly 165 apps were being submitted every day. Now, it's up to around 265 per day. That's the overall number of submissions with no accounting for quality or spamminess. While it is not a problem unique to Windows Phone, the percentage of crappy or spammy apps may be enough to sour some early adopters, something the fledgling system can ill afford to do. For example, it seems like every good or useful app in the Marketplace is bound by several RSS feed readers. And even though Microsoft is attempting to simplify the process of finding decent apps, they need to get ahead of the curve to keep users interested.

It's become a chicken or the egg debate for Microsoft. How do you attract developers that can make a killer app if you don't have huge numbers of people using the system? But, how can you convince people to use the system without a killer app? Maybe it does come down to marketing, but because the entire world on mobile apps is still so new, it's entirely possible Microsoft is on the right track. There was a time, after all, when Apple and Google were the upstarts to the BlackBerries and Nokia's of the world. Tell us in the comments if you think the Windows Phone system is doomed or if you think it will teeter on the edge for a while longer before taking off or sinking.