You’ll have to excuse the bare bones nature of this post but I’m on vacation and “off the grid” for the most part.  But I saw this and had to point out the glaring flaw in it.  From WMPowerUser.com…

We continue to see rather odd stories not just suggesting, but openly saying “Windows Phone is performing poorly, because they do not have 300,000 applications” as if the other prominent mobile operating systems sprung full blown from the heads of their creators with hundreds of thousands of applications.

IDC analyst however has been pretty impressed with the rate at which the Windows Phone Marketplace has been adding applications.

“The Windows Phone 7 Marketplace reaching 4,000 apps two months after launch has to be one of the most rapid ramp-ups in recent times, reaching this milestone faster than Android, which took from Oct 2008 to March 2009 to reach about the same level,” Al Hilwa, an analyst with research firm IDC, wrote in a Dec. 19 research note.

Here is a graph of the numbers they refer to (iPhone is the red line and Android is the green)…

This story has been picked up by several other news sources.   Sadly not one of them questioned IDC’s conclusions.  Had they done so they’d realize there’s a serious flaw in this comparison.  From Wikipedia…

The Android Market was announced on 28 August 2008 and was made available to users on 22 October 2008. Priced application support was added for U.S. users and developers in the U.S. and UK in mid-February 2009. UK users gained the ability to purchase priced applications on 13 March 2009.

So IDC compares the Android Market’s growth from when it first opened in October 2008 but you couldn’t actually SELL apps in the Android Market until nearly 4 months after that date.  Up to that point it was all freebies which could certainly account for the slow growth. 

For those who don’t follow these things Windows Phone 7 offered developers the ability to charge right out of the gate.

To me this is a big enough flaw in the comparison to make it irrelevant.  You can’t compare hobbyists writing apps for free to people who actually plan to make money.  Doing so creates a false impression and when looking at the WP7 numbers from the perspective of free app developers vs paid app developers the numbers still seem pretty bleak. 

(given how harsh that sounds I’d like to point out I still don’t think numbers matter when talking about Windows Phone 7)

Addendum: In fairness Engadget did point out yet another flaw in this analysis that deserves mentioning...

There are several things to consider here. Android launched on the T-Mobile G1 alone, which means that for most of the period IDC mentions, the Android Market was really more of the "G1 Market" than anything else: one device, one carrier, one country. It wasn't until the first half of 2009 that additional markets and devices came online, and even then it was slow going -- typically one device on one carrier per market. Windows Phone 7's had a moderately more well-supported and well-rounded launch with devices from HTC, LG, Dell, and Samsung reaching multiple carriers in multiple countries across North America and Europe within a few days of each other. Sure, you could use the iPhone as the counterexample here; Apple saw explosive App Store growth with just two devices (the original and the 3G) on a handful of carriers around the world, but by the time third-party apps were enabled, the company had already assembled a big installed base of users hungry for more functionality.