Windows Phone Marketplace Launches in 22 Countries

 

Building a strong and thriving app ecosystem is difficult, but Microsoft is taking the task of expanding Windows Phone Marketplace seriously. In a blog post on Thursday, the company announced that Marketplace has launched in 22 new countries.

Only days after outlining plans for improving Windows Phone apps, the company added nearly two dozen countries to its Marketplace audience. Those countries include: Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Israel, Thailand, and Vietnam.

While many in the tech industry, Steve Wozniak included, have praised Windows Phone for its intuitive, tile-based UI, the platform sorely lags behind iOS and Android in terms of app choices. And Microsoft is well aware of this missing component.

In the past year, Microsoft has used various tactics to increase Windows Phone app development. The number of apps on the Windows Phone Marketplace has grown from around 7,000 apps last year to more than 80,000 apps today, Marco Argrenti, Nokia’s Senior Vice President of Developer Experience and Marketplace, told FierceDeveloper in an interview.

In that same interview, Argrenti said that Nokia has given 17,000 Lumia phones to developers in order to promote Windows Phone app development. And last month, The New York Times reported that Microsoft is so determined to grow out its app marketplace, that it is paying developers to create apps for Windows Phone.

Launching Marketplace in more countries is just another step to appease and attract Windows Phone developers, and make Windows Phone a competitive option in the iOS and Android dominated market. Only time will tell whether all of Microsoft’s efforts will actually make Windows Phone a viable third platform and pay off in consumer adoption.

In the meantime, the Windows Phone team is working to make Marketplace easier to use for current Windows Phone users by reviewing keywords developers assign to their apps and making the search tool more useful.