Microsoft marked the one-year anniversary of Windows Phone 7 development details with an attack on Android, iOS, and RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook. The company’s Brandon Watson said WP7 had reached 11,500 active apps by focusing on “quality over quantity” where other rivals had been padding. Google’s willingness to accept almost anything as an Android app, Apple’s ban on trial apps, and RIM’s decision to emulate Android apps on the PlayBook were all hiding the number of meaningful apps, Microsoft’s Brandon Watson said.
“We recognize the importance of getting great apps on our platform and not artificially inflating the number of actual apps available to customer by listing ‘wallpapers’ as a category, or perhaps allowing competitor’s apps to run on the platform to increase ‘tonnage,'” he said, referencing RIM co-chief Jim Balsillie’s own reference to Android apps. “We also don’t believe in the practice of counting ‘lite’ apps as unique quality content. In reality they only exist because developers can’t have a Trial API and must therefore do extra work. Finally, we don’t double and triple count apps which are submitted in multiple languages.”
In a criticism of Apple, he noted that most Windows Phone Marketplace apps took an average of 1.8 days to get approved. Apple has usually touted the vast majority of apps getting approved within two weeks and has notably taken months for some apps with no explanation, especially for apps from Google that it saw as competition. Microsoft has been helped by the considerably lower number of apps it needs approve, where Apple needs to approve thousands each day.
Watson teased the upcoming MIX11 developer event on April 12 and hinted that it would primarily focus on Mango, the major update for late 2011. It brings multitasking, the IE9 web rendering engine, and basic integration with the Xbox 360’s Kinect controller.
