As reported on TechCrunch.
by Alex Wilhelm
Buried in its MWC slides, Microsoft announced that it now serves 4 million application downloads daily from the Windows Store, the application marketplace for Windows 8.x.
Four million downloads per day works out to 120 million per month, or around 1.4 billion per year. The number essentially slipped past the larger media radar — props to wind8apps! — which means even though a few days have passed, we have work to do.
(Previously, Microsoft listed detailed download information for the Windows Store on the developer portal. Once I started covering the data, Microsoft first limited it, and then yanked it altogether. The company promised to keep developers up to date regarding the Windows Store. Thus far two blog posts have been produced in the nearly three-month intervening period. But I digress.)
The last month for which we have full data was October, prior to the holiday sales cycle that is critical for the PC market. So, we have pre and post data to compare. To refresh your memory, here were the numbers Microsoft published, that have since been redacted (my math work; what was provided was siloed):
So, In October the Windows Store did a touch over 51.1 million downloads. Compared to the current pace of 4 million per day (implied monthly total: 120 million), you can quickly calculate that the Windows Store has grown its downloads by 134.6 percent since October. That’s more than 100 percent growth in less than a half-year.
Better than you expected? I’m also surprised by the figure. So much so I tracked down the original slide containing the data point and reconfirmed the number with Microsoft.
iOS’s App Store is still approximately a bajillion bigger than the Windows Store. Last June, iOS reached the 50 billion app download mark. That’s a lot.
But what makes the Windows Store figure interesting is not that it is a large number in comparison to what Apple has put on the scoreboard; instead, it’s evidence that the Windows 8.x platform actually can deliver app download figures of scale, making it potentially interesting to more developers.
I doubt there is a certain concrete threshold for Windows 8.x that it must cross to be taken more seriously, but breaking the nine-figure monthly download rate likely matters, if only symbolically.