The State of the Windows Phone 7 Ecosystem

The Windows Phone 7 marketplace recently reached over 40,000 apps. This surpasses Blackberry, which has long been considered the 3rd ecosystem behind Android and iOS.

Despite this fact, Windows Phone 7 still has a long way to go to gain some ground. The app quantity is gaining steam, but what about the quality of apps? With the launch of the marketplace, developers seemed to put very little customization into their apps for WP7, often using the default templates with very little customization. This created a marketplace filled with apps where many apps looked identical and somewhat boring. While some may argue it made these apps appear “native” and a part of the core OS, I feel developers have just taken a while to grasp this new ‘Metro’ design language (personally I am a big fan).

Other than the lack of ingenuity in some apps, WP7 lacks some of the game engines which are used to develop some of the bigger gaming titles. Unity is the big one that comes to mind, but others such as the Unreal engine will not be coming to the platform. These engines are not being ported to WP7 due to the lack of native access, something which will hopefully be opened to third parties in the future, albeit under close supervision. This is certainly troublesome, especially considering the large focus on xbox live integration with Windows Phone.

Hopefully as the OS matures, we will see more companies really spend time to design their apps for the platform. From my perspective it seems we are seeing a lot of “quick ports” instead of companies rethinking the layout of their app for the (still) fledgling OS.

Here are some glaring holes I am seeing in the marketplace:

• Mint.com
• Other financial institutions (Capital One and Etrade for myself)
• A truly creative twitter app (this is something Nenvy may look towards next)
• Instagram
• Pandora (although a 3rd party app should be arriving soon)
• Paypal

Those are just the first few that come to mind. Hopefully we will see those apps created shortly!

Side note: if you have any other apps you would like Nenvy to create, please let us know. We have a small team and limited bandwidth, but are more than willing to try to squeeze in some additional projects.

Image Credit: Gizmodo