Microsoft Disputes Apple, Google App Numbers

Breaks out the ol' "quality over quantity" argument

Microsoft isn't too happy about the way its competitors Apple and Google tally the number of available apps for their respective platforms, Information Week reports.

In a blog post, Windows Phone Director Brandon Watson accused the companies of conflating their app numbers by including questionable items in their counts. "What is an app? It's a question that really begs some scrutinizing," wrote Watson.

He claimed that there are now more than 11,500 apps available for the burgeoning Windows Phone 7 OS. "For us, from the beginning, we have always been focused on quality over quantity. We recognize the importance of getting great apps on our platform and not artificially inflating the number of actual apps available to customers by listing 'wallpapers' as a category, or perhaps allowing a competitor's apps to run on the platform to increase 'tonnage,'" he wrote.

The report by Information Week claims that the figure pales in comparison to Apple's 350,000 available apps and Android's 30,000. (Note: The Android figure is either a typo or a misreport. Android's market exceeded 100,000 apps six months ago.)

Either way, Microsoft isn't buying it. "We also don't believe in the practice of counting 'lite' apps as unique quality content. In reality they only exist because developers can't have a trial API and must therefore do extra work. Finally, we don't double and triple count apps which are submitted in multiple languages," wrote Watson.

Watson also boasted about the number of developers that WP7 has garnered (36,000 have registered), but made no mention of Microsoft's declining mobile market share.

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