BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone 8 are still struggling to match the most popular apps on the dominant Android and iOS platforms, which could continue to slow sales of the smaller mobile platforms.

After looking at a list of 102 popular apps on Android and iOS, we found that only 34 percent of the apps had BlackBerry 10 versions or equivalents, while 63 percent had Windows Phone 8 versions or equivalents.

That means Windows Phone 8 has just kept pace with the leaders since its launch. When we first reviewed the OS in late October, it had 60 percent of the top 95 Android and iOS apps at the time.

Why Popular Apps Matter

Platform vendors regularly tout the size of their app stores, but we all know size doesn't mean quality. As many people have said, the world doesn't need another fart app.

The smartphone world is dominated by Google and Apple. According to ComScore, Google and Apple currently own 90 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, with BlackBerry at 5.9 percent and Microsoft at 3.1 percent market share. In terms of current sales globally, numbers are even tougher. IDC said that Windows Phone had 2.6 percent market share and BlackBerry 3.2 percent of global sales in the fourth quarter of 2012.

And while not every American has a smartphone yet - comScore says only about 53 percent of us do - most of the people buying smartphones know someone with a smartphone. When they hear about the hottest app or coolest thing that their friends are doing, they'll want to do it too, and not feel like a maroon.

I collected the top 20 free and top 20 paid apps from the Apple, Google, and Amazon app stores, supplementing the Apple list with the company's top 10 overall free and paid apps of 2012. I skipped over apps that are impossible to duplicate on other platforms, like ROM managers and widget sets. Eliminating all duplicates, that left me with 102 apps, of which 68 were available on Android and 52 on iOS.

I then searched the Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10 markets for those apps. If an app wasn't available, I looked for a functionally equivalent app - a third-party Pandora client, for instance. Relatively generic flashlights and Sudoku games could be substituted for each other. If an OS had an app's features baked in (like Yahoo mail support) that also counted as having a functionally equivalent app. But apps from competing major brands (Accuweather vs. Weather.com, for instance) were not considered equivalents. At that level of brand recognition, people want the brands they want.

Android vs. iOS Apps on BlackBerry and Windows Phone

BlackBerry had 15 of the 102 apps, plus 20 functional equivalents, for a total of 35. Windows Phone had 35 of the 102 apps, plus 29 equivalents, for a total of 64.

BlackBerry had slightly more iOS apps than Android apps proportionately. Of the 52 iOS apps surveyed, BlackBerry had 35 percent as opposed to 31 percent of the 68 Android apps. That's interesting because BlackBerry 10 is supposed to "run" Android apps.

As I found out when developing my own app, that isn't entirely true. Android app developers (or pirates) have to submit their apps to the BlackBerry World store, and the apps can't contain a range of Android APIs including Google Maps access. BlackBerry also wants top developers - such as the ones on this list, presumably - to be writing custom BlackBerry apps, not just repurposing Android apps.

Windows Phone had 63 percent of the Android apps, and 58 percent of the iOS apps.

There's a bright spot for the minority platforms: most of the missing apps with no equivalents were games. While neither platform has Instagram, Pandora, or Office Suite Pro (to take some examples from the lists), they have first- or third-party clients for all of these services. The key problem both platforms had was matching popular games, whether it's big-name titles like Temple Run and Real Racing 3 or fly-by-night hits like Candy Crush Saga and Icomania.

I can hear what some BlackBerry partisans, especially, will say: it sounds something like "Nar nar nar, we don't need any dumb games, we're hard at work, work work work." But these are the apps that current smartphone users are downloading, and if you're going to win people over from other platforms, they need to feel like they're not losing anything.

An Uphill Battle

To try to win developers over to their smaller markets, Microsoft and BlackBerry are offering hand-holding and incentives, and both companies are targeting the most popular apps.

BlackBerry identifies the top 100-200 apps per country each month and courts those developers, execs said at the BlackBerry Z10 launch event in January. BlackBerry offers a bounty of up to $10,000 for developers who create high-quality, native apps. That garnered the new platform 70,000 apps at launch, which the company expects to be 100,000 apps by the time the Z10 comes out on AT&T.

BlackBerry also puts out a weekly email alert noting high-profile apps new to the platform. This week's update shows how much the company focuses on apps that are popular in specific countries or regions; along with the globally popular Jetpack Joyride, I see apps for Canada (Rogers Smart Home), Italy (Twellness), Brazil (Ka'arupan) and Malaysia (The Star.)

Microsoft doesn't offer bounties, but it's been working hard to make personal connections with developers and help market their apps. The company is currently running a "Next App Star" contest to feature an app in an upcoming TV ad, and its existing celebrity-focused ads show third-party apps on all the home screens.

The platforms have exclusive apps and first-party features, too, of course. I've been using a Windows Phone as my primary device for a few months now, and I love the People Hub, live tile home screen, Nokia's HERE Transit (a real wonder) and Kid's Corner, for instance. These core features helped propel Windows Phone to win our Readers' Choice award for 2013. Windows Phone users, clearly, are satisfied.

If they want existing Android and iOS users to join them, though, it would help to have more of these popular apps.

The first smartphone with BlackBerry 10, the BlackBerry Z10, hits the U.S. on March 22 via AT&T. It lands on Verizon on March 28. For more, see PCMag's first look at the Z10 and our hands on with the upcoming BlackBerry Q10, which boasts the traditional QWERTY keyboard.

Further Reading

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