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Ask HN: Where are the Windows Phone Marketplace Millionaires?
We've all heard or read stories of financial success from developers targeting Apple's iOS platform. Microsoft recently started the first round of payouts for developers from the Windows Phone Marketplace, but I haven't heard any great success stories. Has anyone heard different?
- gsivil 16y agoI am just one data point but I have not heard any. I would not be posting that if I was not sure that this would resonate with many HNers here.
- pedalpete 16y agowith < 2 million devices sold at this point, I doubt you're going to see millionaires yet. Assuming you'd need 1 million downloads to make $1 million, check back when WP has 20 million+ devices in use.
- gspyrou 16y agoI agree that the number of available devices is not sufficient in order to make solid conclusions about the marketplace potential. When do think Windows Phone will have 20+ million devices in use ?
- pedalpete 16y agoI have no way of knowing when, but lets try to extrapolate a bit. In Dec we heard the figure of 1.5 million devices sold to Carriers. A month later we hear that 2 million devices have been sold to carriers. Not all of those devices were sold to customers, so we can't say they are running 500k activations/month, so lets take that down to say 300k activations/month after being on the market for 4 months. Assuming they sold 200k in the first month, that's 10% growth/month. A nice comfortable number. If they are able to continue on that growth cycle it is 24 months to 20 million devices. However, with the explosive growth that Android saw, 300k handsets activated per day, I suspect we'd see WP7 reach 1/4 of that within the first year. So let's say at 16 months they are activating 2 million devices a month. Either metric, you're looking at 1.5-2 years to reach 20 million devices. Thoughts?
- gspyrou 16y agoIn case the rumors related to NOKIA using WP7 as the OS for some of their devices come true , I think the number of 20 million devices will happen sooner. Especially if they manage to launch WP7 devices within 2011 to China ,where Nokia has a very strong position.
- josephcooney 16y agoI found the following AppHub forum posts where some developers talk about their sales/download/trial numbers http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/69061.aspx http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/69061.aspx (in early to mid Dec most devs were posting numbers < 100. The highest I saw was the Farseer games guy(s) that had ~1K). Some free games were > 10K.