Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is now the fifth largest app store. It is outstripped only by the Apple App Store, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store and BlackBerry App World.
In the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, which was launched last November, 70% of the apps were paid. This ratio was maintained until February 2011. From that moment on, the number of free apps began to grow exponentially. In June, the online store had 900 more free apps than paid ones. In July, Microsoft introduces a new policy that prohibits developers from publishing more than 20 of the same type of applications per day. As a result, about a thousand free applications were removed. Their number began to grow again in August and September and again, as a result, began to exceed the volume of paid applications.
As App2Top already mentioned, since the launch of Windows Phone 7 Marketplace a year ago, the number of paid applications has been growing at a rate of about 1300 per month, free -1650, and developers have been on average 700 more every month.
As for the popularity of categories, the most popular category is games. In October, 33% of the top 100 free apps were games, while 54% were paid apps.
But if you look at the category of games by country, the situation is not so homogeneous. If in the USA and Australia there were about 50% of the best free games apps, while in Brazil, South Korea, Norway and the Netherlands their share ranged between 15% and 20%.
The contrast between countries is even greater if you look at paid apps. If there are 64% of the top 100 games apps in the UK and South Africa, then in Brazil and South Korea there are only 10% of the top 100 apps.
Information about other popular categories can be found on the graphs below.
