A reader earlier today asked if the overall growth of the global count of apps while US English stayed at a lower count generally meant that non-English markets were growing well. The answer is yes – in fact I pointed out that the locale with the second largest app count is the Chinese/China locale, at 3,456 – which interestingly has a much higher app count than any other Chinese markets (Chinese/Singapore: 3,104, Hong Kong: 3099, or Taiwan: 2953) – indicating that – in this case – app developers aren’t blanketing apps across locales that may not be appropriate for them.

In general, I’m still seeing some app developers squeeze apps that aren’t locale appropriate outside of the locale where they do belong – but in general, I think this is getting better.

I thought I’d take a quick moment to examine the commenter’s idea of which locales were at the top of the charts. So here we go – the top 10 Windows Store locales (actually 5, since there are multiple ties):

Rank	Locale	Number of apps
1	US English (en-us)	3,660
2	China/Chinese (zh-cn)	3,456
3 (tie)	Mexico/Spanish (es-mx)	3,384
3 (tie)	Japan/Japanese (ja-jp)	3,384
4 (tie)	Basque (eu-es)	3,378
4 (tie)	Catalan (ca-es)	3,378
4 (tie)	Galician (gl-es)	3,378
4 (tie)	Spain/Spanish (es-es)	3,378
5 (tie)	UK/English (cy-gb)	3,289
5 (tie)	UK/Welsh (cy-gb)	3,289

Interesting notes – all of the *-es locales are tied other than Mexico. This likely means that apps are being offered across all of the locales even when they may not really be localized. Same in the two UK locales listed – I sincerely doubt (m)any apps have been properly localized to Welsh.

I also thought it was strange that by the time I hit 10, I hadn’t run into the German (de-de) locale. Amusingly, it was next, with 3,252 apps.

Disclaimer: These counts were tabulated using information available last night, and do not include desktop applications. As a result, when you perform a search from your Windows 8 (or Window RT, if you have one) device, the count will be higher than the above. That’s expected. I never include desktop applications in my counts, and only retrieve my dataset once per day.