http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and ... 15-1201321

Whoo!

It does not need millions of apps as long as what they have is good. Most of the time you really have to look closely at the apps to check that you are not buying a turkey.

+1
Many apps have similar functions, the trick is to find the best one.

Exactly, if they have 100,000 first class app, then they don't need another 900,000 dross ones. That is one problem with the iOS and Android stores.

Also, Windows/Windows Phone will always have a lot fewer apps than iOS and Android, because you get 1 version of the app, not 2 (a lite/free and a full/paid for version) versions of many apps. With Windows you download a paid for app in "trial" mode and if you like it, you pay and the additional functionality is released, no new download, no second app appearing in your app list. To compare the number of apps in the iOS and Android stores, you would first need to remove all of these "duplicates" to get a fairer comparison.

If Microsoft take more action in filling in the gaps in the app store then they might actually do well. There are a lot of commercial apps which could be helped by making it easier for them to make apps for the phone.

I think its unlikely I'm afraid. The problem is not the 'mass' of apps it's about innovation and reward. If you have an interesting app to sell, you're not going to look at windows 8 phone for it, you're going to look where the money is, which is Android and (mostly) iOS. So you aren't going to get an instagram or such starting up on WP8 because there's simply not a big enough population to sustain a business.

That means WP8 is always going to be playing 'catch up' with apps, which means it's always less attractive to the majority of smartphone buyers.

It's a catch-22, it'll have a reputation for not having any apps until they get many more users and they're not going to get any more users without having the apps people want to use first, or at least the same time as iOS/Android. And unless MS effectively bribe a big chunk of the mobile phone dev industry, there's o way out of that for them.

NOTE: I'm not saying WP8 doesn't have any innovative or attractive apps, I'm saying it has the reputation of not having enough of them.

Which is why Microsoft will have to do it instead.

well, good luck with that.

The problem for Microsoft is that until there are the apps they might not get the users, and without the users the independent developers will not fill the gaps in the app store.

Another part of the reason the stores are flooded is you'll get a reasonable app but find it's missing that one thing you need or doesn't do that thing as advertised. You then wind up using multiple apps just to get one aspect of a job done. When it comes to file formats for instance, Jesus... Or browsers.

The same for weather apps.

Instagram is now on Wp8.

And in some markets, like Italy and Germany, it is matching or outselling iPhone sales. In those markets, I can see apps picking up. At the current rate, Android os going to be the place to launch new apps and iOS and Windows will be fighting it out for the best also ran.

I think it will be a few years yet before that happens. The average price of Android apps is a lot lower than iOS apps and so the money is still in iOS apps.

I mean the next Instagram. Instagram is on WP8, but it took bloody ages to get there. Whatever the 'next big thing' is going to be, it almost certainly isn't going to start on WP8.


Hmm.. can you provide some references for that?


Certainly Android is going to continue to be the most used smartphone OS in the near future. However, the fact remains if you want to make a living writing apps, you still do it on iOS first. That was true before Android was most popular and it still is now, so I can't really see that necessarily changing in say the next couple of years - Android's bigger user population doesn't seem to be translating into bigger revenue for app developers, or at least not generally. The big thing of interest is China, rather than the US or Europe. Writing apps in Chinese will probably become more worthwhile than writing them in English (or Italian or German for that matter) but I don't think anyone really knows which OS will gain the upper hand in China. Personally I'm not entirely sure it'll be any of the OS's that have been written in the West, I think it's more likely to be something natively developed.

In China it might depend on how the NSA scandal impacts iPhone sales there. Even Android could be hit, and the Chinese might push secure local Linux versions instead.


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