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Windows Store passes 50,000 apps

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 1 min

Windows Store

After five months on the market, Microsoft’s Windows Store has surpassed 50,000 apps, according to MetroStore Scanner. The number of apps available is an indication of developer support, and it shows that the overall ecosystem is in a healthy state.

If you remember when the Apple iTunes App Store surpassed 50,000, the mark generated a lot of excitement about the platform’s viability. Now, iOS has more than 821,438 active apps available. Of course, it would be nice to know how many of the Microsoft apps have actual downloads. Apple’s downloads have surpassed 10 billion.

Still, Microsoft is on its way to offering a third viable choice to Apple and the Google Play store. The timing of the milestone is nice, as Microsoft will be among the many companies pitching 23,000 attendees at next week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.