Windows Phone Marketplace Now Has More Than 40,000 Apps

Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace has now reached more than 40,000 apps. It's a new milestone for the company just following its first anniversary in October when it celebrated hitting 35,000 apps. The data comes from AllAboutWindowsPhone, using their own tracking system and also breaking down the figure into percentages based on app categories.

At the time of the report, the Windows Phone Marketplace had about 40,189 apps published. About 10,882 of those apps were published within the last 90 days, while 4,770 apps were published in the last 30 days. And all those apps come from a total of 10,731 different publishers. At this rate, the number of apps could reach 50,000 by late January 2012 and possibly sooner should things look up for the Windows Phone platform.

However, the report also notes that the figure differs depending on the market as there are many apps that are specific to a region. Additionally, of the 40,198 apps published, 5,500 of them have either been withdrawn by the publisher or removed by Microsoft. Still, the pace of Windows Phone apps is decent with an average of about 165 new apps being published each day over the last four weeks.

The largest app categories were games and books, which each had about 15% of the pie. Next most popular category was tools and productivity apps, which had 14%, followed by entertainment apps with 13%.