Category: Windows Phone Store

With little fanfare on the By-The-Numbers page, Microsoft has announced that as of September 30, 2014, the combined app total of the Windows Store and the Windows Phone Store has reached 525,000 apps.  This represents a 75% growth since the end of August of this year when the stores had a combined 300,000 apps.  It is an important milestone for Microsoft but the growth rate is the even more impressive number to take away from this news.

One of the last remaining Nokia branded elements of Windows Phone is quickly disappearing.  The Nokia Collection in the Windows Phone store is being renamed to the Lumia Collection and the rollout of this update is already happening for many Lumia users.  It all-but eliminates the Nokia name from Windows Phone as Microsoft pushes forth with the Lumia name on their Windows powered phones.

So just in case you missed it somewhere down the line, I left Windows Phone about 3 years ago out of frustration and started another site, AlliOSNews.  Now I like iOS but it isn’t magical.  I like the iPhone 5s as well but again, it isn’t magical.  To me, the magic was in Windows Phone.  But there was a glaring hole in the platform and that would be the app store.  When I left a few years ago there were less than 25,000 apps in the app store.  That was at a time when Apple was pushing some 300,000.  Yeah, it puts it into perspective that the Windows Phone Store has just now hit the 300K marker.

As I wrote in my first post here a couple of weeks ago, there were two main reasons I came back to the Windows Phone community (besides missing all you peeps of course!).  One was the improvements that Microsoft had made in Windows Phone 8.0 and 8.1 and the second was the Windows Phone Store was finally getting the attention it need from big developers.