

Ask HN: Where are the Windows Phone Marketplace Millionaires? - josephcooney

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?
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josephcooney
I 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> (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.

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pedalpete
with < 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.

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gspyrou
I 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 ?

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pedalpete
I 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?

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gspyrou
In 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.

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gsivil
I 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.

