My prediciton is that by end of the year, WP7 will compete on an equal footing with Android and iOS in terms of feature parity. It might still have an order of magnitude less number of apps, but I suspect that with the opening up of this richer API, the app situation will be much improved as well. This will set up Nokia's entry to the market in 2012. Combining WP7 with good hardware and services like turn-by-turn navigation and a huge retail channel is a recipe for great sales. I am now beginning to believe that Nokia has made a very smart bet.
Past a certain point, that stops mattering. Does iPhone have 1 million apps available, or is it 10 million ? I don't know and I don't care. what I do know is (assuming that I had an iPhone not android)
- 90% of them are crap. Sturgeon's law.
- I would install fewer than 100 of them.
- There's probably an app for it. For any it. e.g. Today I found and installed an app for my local airport, so I can keep track of an upcoming flight.
- There are several good twitter clients, but I'll only install one.
- Between maps, twitter, facebook, calendar, email and angry birds, there's 95% of my app usage accounted for.
And you could say roughly the same for WP7, even if there's only 10 000 apps avaialble.
