Microsoft has done an admirable job making Windows Phone 8 a good, if not great, mobile operating system. But if one thing’s still missing, it’s support from big companies when it comes to apps.
The recent release of the Nokia Lumia 1020 highlighted this — immensely. This Windows Phone has the best smartphone camera on the market, but you can’t post photos to Instagram, and you can’t upload videos directly to YouTube. Basically, the power of the device is wasted because Windows Phone hasn’t caught up to app catalog of iOS and Android.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":790916,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"mobile,","session":"C"}']Now to be fair, Windows Phone does have more than 160,000 apps, and it’s adding big names like Hulu all the time. And just today Microsoft added Bing Weather, News, Sports, and Finance apps that were just on Windows 8 to Windows Phone.
But unlike iOS and Android, the catalog still has a ton of gaps. Nick Landry, a senior product manager for Infragistics, has made a full list of the most “important” iOS applications and compared whether Android and Windows Phone have these apps. The list shows that Android has 95 percent of them, but Windows Phone only has 63 percent.
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Here’s the list of the most important apps still missing from Windows Phone, with a few absolutely crucial missing apps in bold:
- ABC Player
- Amazon Instant Video
- BBC News
- Citibank
- CBS Interactive Player
- CBS News
- CNBC Real-Time
- ComiXology
- Expedia
- Fox Business
- Good Morning America
- Google Maps
- Google+
- HBO Go
- Instapaper
- Kobo Books
- Marvel Comics
- Mashable
- Mint.com
- MLB.com At Bat
- NBC Player
- Nook
- Photoshop Express
- PNC Bank
- Readability
- TBS Player
- Trulia
- Vine
- Watch ESPN
- WebMD
- Wells Fargo
- Yahoo Messenger
- Yahoo Weather
A few of the apps on this list will be coming down the line in the near future. Vine and Flipboard were announced last month, but the apps aren’t available yet.
What do you think of list? Any other important apps you think Windows Phone needs to add in a hurry?
h/t BGR
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