Windows Phone Store is now home to 145,000 apps

While announcing the newest Lumia 928 for Verizon, Nokia also mentioned within its blog that Windows Phone store now has 145,000 apps. The app count is not a vast growth from the 120,000 figure from October last year, when Windows Phone 8 was first launched.

It looks like the ecosystem seems to be hitting a rocky patch, with not too many apps being submitted after the initial rush that saw the Windows Phone Store doubling in size as far as submissions went in the first half of the year.

App submissions slow down massively

But is that entirely a bad thing? Despite the lack of new apps and submissions to the Windows Phone Store, it looks like developers have been working on improving user experience on the existing apps, and Microsoft is behind these major changes. Apps from Foursquare to Facebook and even YouTube have seen major overhauls in the past few months.

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YouTube’s app refresh should be noted specially, since it had become the bone of contention between Google and Microsoft. The app was earlier nothing more than a glorified wrapper that redericted you to YouTube on mobile web. Now the app has elements of the Modern UI and is on par with other YouTube apps across various platforms.

The need for newer apps should not be neglected by Microsoft, though. The company needs to train its guns at developers with the aim of getting high quality apps added to the Store periodically; else, it risks stagnation.