Microsoft took a shot at its competitors in the smartphone market, emphasizing that it was focused on quality of apps rather than sheer numbers. .

To talk up its Windows Phone 7 operating system, Microsoft said it developed 1.5 million Windows Developer Tools and had 11,500 apps. It also took a thinly veiled shot at some of its competitors, saying it will not inflate its app store figures.

For us, from the beginning, we have always been focused on quality over quantity. We recognize the importance of getting great apps on our platform and not artificially inflating the number of actual apps available to customer by listing wallpapers as a category, or perhaps allowing competitor's apps to run on the platform to increase tonnage. We also don't believe in the practice of counting lite apps as unique quality content, wrote Brandon Watson, a senior director at Windows phones, on the company's blog.

Watson also said its ecosystem generated 10,000 apps faster than anyone else, without padding the stats. He added the company has had 7,500 apps that have made the developer money; which is what he acknowledged developers are most concerned with.

Among the other numbers touted by Microsoft:

-1,200 new developers every week

-12 apps per customer per month

-1.8 days on average it takes for an app to get certified

-44 percent of apps contain a trial version

The company released the numbers in honor of its one-year anniversary of releasing free developers tools for the operating system. It officially unveiled the operating system back in October.

We look forward to further increasing the engagement and transparency with our developer community, including more visibility into the update release schedules, roadmaps, access to early builds of the new OS and more time with our team. You deserve it. We are nothing without our developers, Watson said.

Microsoft did not respond to a request for further clarification of its comment on numbers inflation.

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