Silverlight developer Justin Angel utilized the Windows Phone 7 markeplace API’s to download all Windows Phone 7 XAP’s. This sounds incredibly technical, but it allowed Angel to gather some interesting statistics about the Marketplace. Here are just a few snippets, but I’d suggest reading his article in it’s entirely. With Mango, the XAP’s will be encrypted, so this sort of analysis will no longer be possible.
- There aren’t 30,000 apps in the Marketplace. In fact, there are only 24,505
- 97% of the apps aren’t obfuscated, meaning they could be reverse engineered
- Sliverlight accounts for 90% of WP7 apps compared to just 10% for XNA
- There are around 925 apps repeating themselves in total of 6,881. That means that 20% of the Marketplace is published more than once. Apps are cloned for a number of reasons, but that brings the net total apps to 18,549.
This is some great work done by Justin. Give it a read.
Source: Justin Angel
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