Too often it seems we hear people write off the Windows Phone 7 platform as doomed, all because its application store does not have the hundreds of thousands of apps that iOS and Android enjoy.
How fair is that? You can walk down the quantity/quality argument all day and get no where, or you can look at the start of the other two major platforms and compare how quickly all three grew when they were new.
If you do so, and our friends at IDC have, you will learn an interesting fact: the Windows Phone 7 app marketplace is growing more quickly than Android’s store did at launch, and is also somewhat comparable to the iPhone’s. In other words, if Windows Phone 7 is off to a slow start, then so were Android and the iOS platform when they came out.
According to IDC’s research, it took Windows Phone 7 just two months to reach 4,000 applications It took Android “from Oct 2008 to March 2009” to do the same. Impressive, if we can say so. Now, let’s compare the growth of WP7 and iOS (graph via WMPoweruser):
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The red line is the iOS store at launch, and the green is WP7. Still want to write off Microsoft’s new phone initiative?
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