The last 48 hours have been very significant for the Windows Store. More than the count – which is up significantly just in the last 2 days – apps from many mainstream news and entertainment sources have begun to arrive, and some new apps have shown up that take advantage of the WinRT platform on Windows 8 and Windows RT. I’ve posted quite a few updates in the last 2 days about what’s new and relevant on the store on my Twitter account, so start there if you’re looking for individual apps.

The big question is, where is the store at on 10/26? Well, the store didn’t quite bust the 10,000 app mark worldwide by launch. But it did come close – 9,029 applications available worldwide. In each of the last two days, more than 500 apps have shown up daily – and again, quite a few of these have been high-quality apps from mainstream content providers around the world that can help lift the platform.

Below, you can see the total growth of the Windows Store since I started a daily tally beginning on 9/9:

Recall that when I started counting in mid-August, the Windows Store had 530 apps in it. When I say 9,029 Windows Store apps worldwide – it’s important to understand a few things:

1. This excludes desktop apps, which will not work with Windows RT.
2. This is across ALL locales that the Windows Store supports. There is no locale that supports every single app, so all stores have a count of less than 9,029 in their own inventory.
3. This is polled once per day, so the actual count can increase through the day.
4. These apps are usually not available to pre-release versions of Windows 8. It’s time to update to the final release!

Out of the global count, 88% (still) of apps, a total of 7,940, are free:

Amazingly, while the store has grown dramatically, the worldwide percentage of free apps has remained almost constant for just under one month (hovering between 87 and 89% free). The number of free apps in the US Windows Store (until recently, the locale with the largest inventory) has generally been lower than that percentage.

The Chinese Windows Store continues to have the largest inventory, with 5,553 apps as of today. The second largest inventory is the US store, with 5,179 Windows Store apps. Yes, these two locales now feature over 5,000 apps – the only two that broke the 5,000 mark by today. That said, every locale supported by the Windows Store now features over 4,000 apps. This does not, however, take into account how well these apps are localized for each locale (if they indeed are), or how useful the apps are. There’s still too many apps barely above “hello world”, simply sugar-coating the templates provided by Visual Studio, and many that are failing at fundamentals such as inserting their own application icon, leaving the “todo” icon inserted by Visual Studio!

As before, about 6% of Windows Store apps available worldwide do not support Windows RT. We will see over the next few weeks if this changes as more developers obtain Windows RT systems and can test for, and properly support, Windows RT.

In terms of developers, there are 3,751 distinct entities with apps on the Windows Store worldwide. Regrettably, there are quite a few developers who are doing exactly what Microsoft had said they would discourage developers from doing, and submitting multiple apps that all had the same or nearly similar functionality (IMHO, “quote apps” seem to be one of the worst offenders in almost every ecosystem’s store). The top 11 developers all have more than 50 apps each – I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. That said, the mode of developers on the store have only 1 app each.

Looking just at the Windows Store in the US for a moment, then, we can see it holding at the same percentage of free apps as earlier, 83% (4,278), 5% lower than the worldwide average for the last month. The mode of app prices in the US is US$1.49, with a mean (average) of US$5.23. The most expensive app on the store is one at US$999.99 (BrainControl) – the previous most expensive app, EMR Surface continues to be available at US$499.99. These two financial standouts are, interestingly enough, both in the Health & Fitness category, one of the smallest on the US Windows Store (~2%).

Speaking of categories, we’ve had some good settling as the store wrapped up for GA. See the chart below:

 

I was happy to see that the Productivity category has doubled from 6% from the last time I inventoried the US categories. Games have declined 3% to 17%, but still make up the largest single category. In general, I think the spread of the top 6 categories is now in a reasonably healthy place, and as I noted, we’re starting to see some good keystone apps arrive in the store, and the next several weeks and months will likely bring more.

All in all, more than 9,000 apps worldwide, more than 5,000 in two key global markets, and more than 4,000 in all others? Not a bad way to start Windows 8 and Windows RT. Congratulations to Microsoft, their hardware partners, and the Windows Store developers.