Much has been written in the past about Windows Phone’s lack of apps compared with iOS and Android. Both Nokia and Microsoft have responded in the past with claims that quality and not quantity is what matters in an app store. Both arguments represent over-simplifications, and neither accurately captures the reality of what’s going on with the Windows Phone app store and its competitiveness with Android and iOS. This post is a summary of one of the major sections of a new report on the state of Windows Phone published by Jackdaw Research this week, which examines this question among others in depth. The report is available for free here, and I encourage interested readers to download it and read the whole thing.

The quantity gap

Windows Phone does suffer from a quantity gap versus both Android and iOS, which are essentially neck and neck in the app store stakes. On the one hand, Microsoft has done well to get out of the gate quickly and get a good number of apps on the platform in a short space of time – the chart below shows the number of apps on each of the three major platforms within the first 15 quarters following launch:

The problem, of course, is that Windows Phone isn’t competing against those platforms 15 quarters from their launch – they launched considerably earlier, and the current situation is much less favorable:

Windows Phone continues to lag the other two major app stores (and even Apple’s iPad-specific list of apps) considerably, and the gap is widening rather than narrowing.

The quality gap

The frequent response from Nokia (before its acquisition by Microsoft) and from Microsoft itself has been that Android and iOS have thousands of apps no-one needs or uses, and that the real question is one of quality rather than quantity. But the problem is that Windows Phone suffers from a lack of quality as well as a quantity problem. There are several ways to look at that, so I’ll run through a few of them. Continue reading →