Children have a way of growing up fast, and the new kid on the app-store block certainly hasn’t bucked that trend. Late on Tuesday, Microsoft announced that the Windows Store has crossed the 100,000 app threshold, mere days after the company’s big Build conference and a scant eight months after the launch of Windows 8.
Sure, the store didn’t hit that mark in the three months that one ambitious Microsoft executive predicted, but the Windows Store did reach 100k apps faster than both Google Play and iOS’s App Store (albeit long after those markets established a consumer thirst for apps). And, after a somewhat sluggish start and an extreme slow down shortly after the holidays, it’s no small accomplishment for the Windows Store to hit 100,000 apps so soon after its conception.
The Windows Store isn’t complete despite hitting the lofty number. There’s still a general dearth of big-name apps, and both the quality and the quantity of specific slices of the store can be … questionable. A lot of those apps are pretty spammy, or rip-offs playing off the name of more established software and services.
Things have improved, however. From video to music to games and business, most people will be able to find enough apps to scratch their mobile itch—and many, many more apps have been released recently. There is still work to do, but the bones are there. Desktop aficionados will even find modern-style conversions of old favorites like WinZip and (soon) the VLC media player.
