Microsoft's Windows Chief: Hey, Our Windows 8 App Store Grew Faster Than Apple's

Wired/Screenshot Microsoft's Julie Larson-Green

One of the complaints against Windows 8 is the lack of apps. Windows 8 can't run older Windows apps in "Metro" mode and the Windows RT version can't run Windows 7 apps at all.

Seven months after launch, the Windows 8 app store now has 60,000 apps, Tami Reller, Microsoft's chief marketing office for Windows said in an interview.

Yesterday, Reller's colleague, Julie Larson-Green, who leads Windows 8 development, defended the app selection.

Speaking at the 2013 Wired Business Conference in New York, she said, "We have more apps now in our store than Apple had the first whole year."

She's right: A year after Apple opened its Mac App Store, it had10,000 apps.

The bigger question is, does that really matter? Windows 8 is competing with both the Mac and the iPad. And as of March, Apple's iOS store had over 800,000 apps, 333,000 for the iPad. In March, the Mac store was growing at about a rate of more than 850 apps a day, reports Kenny Hemphill at MacUser.

In other words, the Windows App store has to grow faster than Apple's, and it still has a long way to go.