Android Market And Windows Marketplace Pass Major MilestonesAndroid Market And Windows Marketplace Pass Major Milestones

According to the official Twitter account for the Android Developer group, the Android Market has breached the 100,000 application mark. This milestone comes nearly two years after the Market first launched in 2008 with the arrival of the HTC G1.

The Android Market hasn't shot up as meteorically as the iPhone App Store has, but with 100,000 apps under its belt, Android users have plenty of options. It was just three months ago that the Market was at 70,000 apps. It has increased by nearly 50% since mid-July.

Despite the size of the Market, developers claim it isn't as easy to make money by offering apps to Google's smartphone users as it is to make money through the iPhone App Store. Will this stifle future development and enthusiasm for the platform? Probably not, at least for the short term.

In other app store news, Microsoft's Marketplace for Windows Mobile has reached the 1,000 application mark just a week after its official launch. That's really good news for Microsoft. The more apps it has available when the first Windows Phone 7 handsets go on sale the U.S. in November, the better.

As I reported last week, a number of major, marquee-name applications are already in the Marketplace. Most of the names we're familiar with from the iPhone App Store and Android Market are already alive and kicking in Microsoft's Marketplace for Windows Phone 7. There is more than enough variety to satisfy the initial cravings of Windows Phone 7 users.

RIM's BlackBerry App World surpassed 10,000 applications back in September. RIM hasn't said how many apps have been downloaded from App World.

Palm's App Catalog had 4,987 apps at the time of this writing, painfully close to the 5,000 mark. According to PreCentral, there have been more than 81 million downloads from Palm's App Catalog.

Nokia's numbers best RIM, Microsoft and Palm combined. It has over 16,000 applications available, and, according to Nokia, experiencing 2.7 million app downloads per day.

Apple remains king of the app store, with about 300,000 apps for its iOS devices.