According to a recent AdDuplex blog post, Windows Phone 8 is being used by more than 50% of the current Windows Phone 8. This is really interesting news, since Windows Phone 8 is a relatively new version and it caught up rather quickly. This means that the Windows Phone market share is rapidly expanding, now more than ever. In the US, the numbers are even more interesting since Windows Phone 8 users account for 70% of all Windows Phone users, but this actually means that not many people were considering Windows Phone before the awesome Lumia 920. But how do these numbers look from an everyday Windows Phone developer, like, say, me ?

In my case, WP8 looks much smaller than this. For the past month, only about 20% of my users for MonsterUp Adventures were using Windows Phone 8.

May 13-June 13 2013 – MonsterUp Adventures WP OS

The month before that, the number was about 16%. For the original MonsterUp the numbers are pretty similar, with 18.4% and 10% respectively.

May 13-June 13 2013 – MonsterUp WP OS

So what can I understand from these numbers? For starters, Windows Phone 8 is a much bigger success and is working much better than Windows Phone 7.x when it comes to customer acquisition. The other thing of course is that people who used to play my games, still love them and still play them :)

Tomorrow I will be giving a speech targeted mostly to iOS and Android developers about why it makes sense to develop apps for Windows Store too. This is a small roundtable event in Microsoft’s building in Zurich. Apart from me, Reto Senn from Bitforge will give a small talk about using Unity to make games for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. If you are in the area, you are welcome to attend, the event starts at 16:15.
I will put the slides here after the event if anyone is interested.
You can see more about the event at the official website of MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-ch/aa570302.aspx?EventID=1032382768 (in German).

Update: The slides can be downloaded here  (31MB).

A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by Ben Riga, senior technical evangelist at Microsoft and Alan Mendelevich from AdDuplex for the bi-weekly AppBizDev podcast. It was quite an enjoyable talk with some very interesting questions (and hopefully answers). One thing is for sure, Ben had done his homework :) We talked about everything, game development on Windows Phone and the Amiga, MonoGame and Unity and more. You can listen the interview over at the official podcast page here:
http://www.appbizdev.com/2013/03/episode-12-marios-builds-monsters-up.html