Once again I was interested in finding out some Windows Phone related stats and couldn’t find them anywhere. I’d like to collect more stats from AdDuplex enabled apps but don’t want to impose unnecessary capability requirements on developers using the control. Unfortunately, last time I checked, you had to set “phone identity” capability just to get a model of a phone. (Is this “fixed” in Mango?)

So I set out to repeat an experiment I did last time to check how many apps already use this capability. Maybe I’m overreacting and almost everyone is already using it.

The Method

I did another non-scientific experiment. I bet you can get this data from official marketplace feeds and have exact numbers. But I was just looking for a big picture. So I wanted to get the results as fast and as easy as possible without doing a ton of research on how to get this data out of marketplace. I just checked 50 newest apps (skipping multiple apps from the same developer).

I’ll leave the exercise of getting precise numbers to Windows Phone sites that already do stats, such as WP7applist.

The Results

You can see the pie charts with my finding below (click for a larger image)

Unfortunately for me only a quarter of apps uses “phone identity” capabilities. So requiring this capability would be an extra capability for many and I’m not sure how developers react to this. Your feedback would be invaluable.

As for other notable results… Almost everyone is using “data connection” in one way or the other. Surprisingly a lot of apps use “media library” and “web browser”.

You can make your own judgment in areas you are interested in. Or get the real data and let me know if it differs dramatically from my findings.