When it comes to business and selling things, you have to be able to monitor sales. You have to know what’s working and what isn’t and most importantly, whether or not you’ll be bringing in the profit for the month. This is exactly why it was a bit surprising when Windows Phone 7?s app market launched withoutany sort of sales monitoring tools. Since its European launch back in mid-October, most WP7 developers have sort of been in the dark as to how their applications were doing.

Fortunately, Microsoft is doing away with this hang-up; as of yesterday, developers have been able to  get their first look at how their apps have been performing over the past few months. Like Apples iTunes connect or Google’s Android Developer Console, Windows Phone 7 has centralized location called App Hubfor developers to submit apps, manage account details, and request support. This morning, App Hub gained a new “Reports” tab, wherein developers can generate sales reports that are based on any time frame since launch, drilled down to any country with access to the Windows Phone 7 market.

So how well are Windows Phone 7 apps selling? The apps are going a bit slow and this should be expected, given that WP7 is a new platform and they have really yet to find their footing. There are only a handful of developers that have applications on all of the major smartphone platforms right now and an even smaller number of those were willing to share their sales numbers. The folks over at TechCrunch were able to track down two different development teams who were willing to shed light on the issue. One of them just said that they were “a bit underwhelmed by their first reports” while the other person got a bit more in depth:

For me, right now sales seem about 1/8 of what they are on Blackberry’s app world, 1/30 of Android sales, and less than 1/100 of iPhone sales.

To be clear no one is expecting Windows Phone 7 application sales to be reaching anything close to that of the competition at this point, the rest have all had months or years to ramp up their momentum, and have large enough user bases that word-of-mouth alone can help to drive App sales. With that being said though, Microsoft needs to find something to give developers a reason to build on their platform. iOS has the massive sales numbers and the simplicity inherent to only being on three devices. Android has its momentous growth, gigantic numbers, and open market mentality. Currently the BlackBerry OS has a dedicated fan-base and at the very east has an enterprise market to cater too. Palm’s App Catalog didn’t have any of these things – a year and a half after launch, its still amidst a rough situation. It’s prime time for Microsoft to find its niche.

On a good note though, after originally announcing that they would not be able to pay developers until sometime in February,  Microsoft announced that they’ll instead be able to start sending out checks in the fourth week of January.

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Authors: _GadgetNews

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