The Windows Mobile 6.5 Marketplace, launched in November 2009, will not have any new apps after July 15, when the App store will not accept submissions from developers.
The reasons behind the demise of this application market are obvious. First, Microsoft wants to focus on its new OS, Windows Phone 7; and second, the platform is not popular. It had only 7,000 applications at its peak. (Compare that number to the 1 lakh plus apps that Android has.)
Windows Mobile 6.5 Marketplace will have only around 1,500 apps going forward till a final decision is taken about its closure, which is likely to be in October this year.
An MSDN forum post by Edgeway software, which broke the news, said that it got an email from Microsoft saying that the company will not accept any further submissions to the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace from July 15.
The number of devices using Windows Mobile 6.5 or older is not known, but this OS was a contender to BlackBerry in the enterprise space. Of late it has not received favours from smartphone buyers, who have switched to new operating systems such as Android and iOS.
A few phones that recently came with Windows Mobile were HTC Touch 2, Acer BeTouch, Acer Neotouch, and Garmin Asus M10. Users of these devices are likely to be affected by this decision.
Even Microsoft has developed a completely new operating system — Windows Phone 7, which is not backward compatible to the older versions of Windows Mobile.
Windows Phone 7 will of course remain the focus of Microsoft in the times to come and will consequently get a lot of applications.
If you are a user of Windows Mobile do write to us to share your feelings about this news.