How Many Windows 8 Apps are in the Windows Store?

Do you know how many Windows 8 Apps are available in the Windows Store?

The Microsoft website says that there are “tons of apps” for Windows 8 and Windows RT in the Windows Store but they haven’t revealed the exact numbers yet.

It turns out that there are 17,041 Windows 8 Apps in the Window Store (as on December 7, en-US) and if you want to dig a little deeper, download this text file as it includes a link to every Windows 8 app that’s currently available in the store .

How did I arrive at this number? Well there’s a sitemap file on apps.microsoft.com website, the domain that also hosts the Windows Store, which solves the mystery.

These always-updated XML sitemap files exist to help web search engines index the online Apps Store  and therefore should have entries corresponding to every app available in the Windows Store. The entries are  further split in 37 files (see a sample) and if you combine them all, it isn’t hard to calculate the actual number of Windows 8 Apps.