apps
Windows Phone Marketplace hits 70,000 apps
Since their introduction, the Windows Phone Marketplace has been playing catch up with its competitor’s official app sources. The App Store on iOS has over half a million apps and the Google Play Store is not far behind. Although the Windows Phone Marketplace is definitely still trailing way behind with 70,000 apps, it is nevertheless an important part of their journey.
Just over two months ago, the Marketplace had just passed an app count of 60,000. That is an addition of about 10,000 apps in a month. That would mean that roughly 300 apps are added daily by over 100,000 registered app developers according to Microsoft. While the number of apps available for download is sometimes a deal breaker for some users looking to purchase a new device, there is also an overlapping issue of quality versus quantity.
The statement above is not a poke at either Android or iOS app collection but if people really thought about the app situation and quality versus quantity, they would agree with what our friends over at Mobiputing say, “I would take a dozen truly excellent apps over a few thousand awful ones any day.”
Among the apps available in the Windows Marketplace are Shazam, Evernote, Foursquare, Netflix, Runkeeper, Flixter, Amazon Kindle, TuneIn Radio which are fantastic apps from very capable app developers so it doesn’t seem like Windows Phone users will be missing out on much. Worse comes to worst, the apps will be a little slow in arriving but don’t fret because they will indeed come if the Windows Phone OS continues to expand as it is currently doing.
Apple is well known to be a company that continues to push the envelope when it comes to technological advancements and firsts. This time around, Cupertino has introduced the first ever automated security update for Mac computers in order to assist them in preventing attacks from recently identified bugs, which are also the very same bugs that that security researchers have pinpointed and warned against, as those could be the gateway for hackers to actually gain remote control of machines.
Over in New Jersey, District Judge William Martini has come up with a ruling that the police are not required to actually pick up a warrant before opening a fake Instagram account. This is because the bogus account could actually be used to receive pictures shared by a suspect, and some folks wonder whether this would require a search warrant to be issued beforehand. Not so, according to Judge Martini in his ruling that stated whenever Instagram users post photos on the site, they happen to be practicing “consensual sharing.”
In other words, users who put up photos on Instagram are more or less in the know that should they “follow” or “friend” others, they will also end up sharing their pictures with them. All in all, one should always be extra careful with whatever one shares with others online, as you can never quite tell how something might end up to bit you in the rear some day down the road.
Both iOS and Android number close to a million apps each on their respective app stores, which is one of the reasons why smartphone users flock to either operating system. Of course there are other factors, such as hardware, pricing, availability and so on, but it is safe to say that app availability plays a big role as well. Well Blackberry seems to think so as well as they have revealed that the Blackberry World app store currently sits at about 120,000 apps, which while still pretty small compared to iOS and Android, is a pretty huge deal considering that the platform and its accompanying devices were only launched earlier this year! Blackberry’s CEO Thorsten Heins praised the thriving ecosystem, which we guess was boosted by Blackberry’s efforts where they held events to encourage developers to submit as many apps as they can, and even offering monetary rewards on top of earnings for every app successfully submitted to Blackberry World. We can see that Blackberry is going for quantity at the moment, and we suppose there are quality apps within those 120,000, but for now it looks like as far as apps are concerned, they may very well be edging Windows Phone out of the picture!