Microsoft hastens to say that its app store has over 560,000 apps, most of them for smartphones, up 60 percent from a year ago. (Apple and Google have said that each of their app stores has more than a million apps.) And Microsoft says it offers from 85 to 95 percent of the apps that people tell the company they want on a smartphone. Netflix, Facebook, Spotify and other A-list apps are all available for Windows Phone.
Yet Microsofts numbers do not capture the slim pickings of other popular apps. People searching for Lyft, HBO Go or Snapchat will find no Windows Phone option. Nor will one find RunKeeper, a popular mobile app for joggers....
...Microsoft has long acknowledged the need to expand its app selection. The company has offered to finance the development of Windows Phone apps for prominent developers, in some cases paying for outside contractors to do the programming work, according to a former Microsoft executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were confidential.
But even that was not enough for the executive at one top mobile-game developer, who said Microsoft gave up asking his company to support Windows Phone about a year ago. We need an actual market and large, global installed base to justify it, said this executive, who did not want to be named in order to preserve his relationship with Microsoft.
Minecraft, one of the most popular mobile games, came out in December for Windows Phone, years after it was available on other platforms. And that happened after Microsoft paid $2.5 billion to buy the developer of the game.
In addition, some of the major apps on Windows Phone are either not as polished or are not updated as frequently as on other platforms. Instagram, the photo-sharing service owned by Facebook, came out on Windows Phone over a year ago, after a long delay, but it still does not include the ability to record video, a function that Instagram introduced nearly two years ago.
