[Windows Phone 7 General] N8ter:
Because Apps and Marketplaces cannot be viewed in an objective manner. When you try to be objective, you end up getting woo'd in by raw numbers, and raw numbers are virtually useless.

It has 15k Apps, but it's still missing many "major" apps. That's what the issue is.

I can care less how much crap is in a marketplace, as long as most of the major apps are there. They aren't there on WP7.

If they were there for WebOS, and that market only had 500 Apps, I would not care that it only has 500 Apps.

In order to gauge the value (how good/bad) of a marketplace you have to step away from the number and judge it based on its contents.

Lots of people are talking about how Android/iOS has just as much crap in there, if not more.

They can afford to have just as much crap in there, if not more. Their App count is an order of magnitude higher than WP7/Blackberry/Ovi/WebOS.

Android and iOS App Markets can be 80% crap and they'll still have more useful applications than all those other app markets I mentioned.

I don't think people generally think 15k apps is bad. I think the problem stems from the fact that the lack of APIs pretty much made it impossible for a lot of good apps to come to the platform, and when you wade through the market you are missing a lot of the decent apps on other platforms, and get just as much cruft.

That makes the app market look worse to anyone, compared to competing platforms - objective or otherwise.

There's nothing in the Window sApp Market that doesn't exist on the big 2, but there's a ton of stuff in the Big 2's app market that does not exist in WP7's app market.

Since a lot of people going to WP7 are/were already smartphone users, they're coming from platforms with a ton of apps and are expecting those apps to be there. They can expect most of them to be there going form Android to iOS or vice versa, but not moving to WP7.

Also, the issue with WP7 is not that Developers aren't interested. It's that Microsoft gave them the middle finger for the entire first year of the platform (where there is the most money to be made due to early adopters and the ability to be first to the platform, etc.) by not providing the APIs necessary for them to even TRY to develop their apps.

Unelss those developers got early Access to Mango Developer Tools, they can't work on anything with those APIs missing.

I don't doubt WhatsApp is coming, but it does not help Microsoft that they have designed their OS in a way that people who rely on certain apps to communicate are impossible to implement on WP7 - forcing those users to either give up or double fist another smartphone platform.

TL;DR: It's not about best/worse case scenarios. It's not about numbers. It's about content and possibilities. People just think WP7 is lacking in what's available and what's possible to implement. That is what is frustrating a lot of users. Waiting a year for WhatsApp on WP7 makes no sense when you can use it now on another platform, not to mention all the other apps that aren't/cannot be ported over until Mango Developer Tools are released (and ultimately, the update is delivered to users' phones - which is a whole other matter altogether...).