With Google Android Marketplace hosting more than 100,000 apps, Apples iStore hosting more than 300,000 apps the number achieved by Microsoft seems too small. Few days back Windows Phone 7 Marketplace reached 1000 apps mark and it is being considered as a milestone. The number is very small when compared with the same of the competitors but the duration in which Windows Phone 7 has achieved this figure is thrilling. It took just 3 week for Windows Phone 7 to get on to this number. If developers could post 1000 apps in thus 3 week then in one year down the line we can forecast what the number would be. Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android has been in the market for quite some time now so comparing the number of 1000 with 300,000 and 100,000 would be not fair.
Google achieved this whopping figure by launching the Software Development Kit for Android phones which gave chance to the freelance companies and developers to give shape to their ideas and develop useful (not always) applications. This definitely has added a lot in increasing the number of applications in the Android Market Place. Apple on the other hand has not let its SDK available to everyone and only registered users can develop the applications for iPhone, iPad, and iPod. Microsoft released the final official version of its Windows Phone 7 SDK only on 16th September 2010 and within a month market place hosts 1000 applications.
Microsoft disclosed that Windows Phone 7 works on the Silverlight and the XNA framework. If you have ever worked on or upon the earlier versions of Windows Phone then you can easily make out the difference in the technology and interface of the new Windows Phone 7. We are aware of Silverlight which is a platform for developing desktop web based applications. This technology is being implemented in the new Windows Phone along with XNA. To quote XNA is a framework technology which is designed to help the developers in creating 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional games and other graphics applications at ease. Both these technologies have been serving for quite some time on the desktop computers but when combined together and that too on a mobile phone they will start a whole new era. With these two technologies working together on Windows Phone 7 users will get high end graphical interface, high end graphics games, and may other capabilities which were first limited only to the desktop computers.
Another great move of Microsoft is developing the SDK in such a way so that device independent applications can be developed. Earlier applications were phone specific and for every phone you have to download a different version of that application. With this new Windows Phone SDK one application can be installed on any phone, regardless of the hardware being used in it. This for sure is a great move and will interest many developers.
