Microsoft Hits 9,000 Apps, Spurs Development With Policy Changes

The Redmond, Wash.-based company said its app market is adding 100 new products a day, drawn from a base of 32,000 registered developers. To further push growth, it has raise the number of free app certifications -- a type of approval -- from five to 100, which will stimulate more trial versions of apps that eventually draw in more paying users.

"Trials result in higher sales. Nearly one out of ten trial apps downloaded convert to a purchase and generate ten times more revenue, on average, than paid apps that don’t include trial functionality," said Todd Brix, Microsoft's senior director of Windows Phone Marketplace.

Windows Phone developers can also now directly include public software licenses such as the Eclipse Public License and Mozilla Public License. More open-source policies could be approved in the future, the company said, freeing up a number of tools that developers could incorporate into their products quickly, speeding up the app-making process.

While it still lags behind Apple's App Store, which counts 350,000 apps, and Google's Android Market, which surpassed the 200,000-app mark in December, the Microsoft app market's rate is healthy growing three times more than just one month after its launch. The surge is much more rapid than BlackBerry App World, which took around a year and a half to get to 10,000.

Microsoft's struggles in the mobile market are well-documented, with failures like the ill-fated Kin phones on the hardware level and difficulties in growing its presence in the smartphone market against competitors like Apple and Google. But a recent alliance with Nokia will find its Windows Phone operating system on more phones on a global scale, providing a scale of opportunity that developers may find attractive.

Stimulating app developer interest is key for device makers, who rely on those programmers to populate a vital part of a smartphone ecosystem, especially as phones begin to compete on games, functionality, services and software as much as hardware specs. Microsoft has even begun encouraging its employees to make apps for its operating system.

The software giant still has quite a distance to travel before it reaches parity with Apple and Google. But by making it easier for its army of developers to make apps, it hopes to increase its level of growth in this key area and catch up to its rivals.