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More than two years ago, Microsoft launched the office store preview. Back then, I remember how excited I was as the store has much potential or it seemed so.

However, when I decided to make a quick review of the store in order to get some insights from the analysis, honestly I was somehow shocked. In December 2012 when I created and published my first SharePoint 2013 app, the number of the applications was around 60 apps. Right now and despite of the enormous support Microsoft gives to its cloud offering and the constant stress that Office 365 is the future. The number of the total apps for SharePoint in the Office Store is 836 apps only.
Which is basically a growth of 7 apps per week  which is a very low number compared to the Apple app store (almost 5K apps per week).

Why the office store is not growing as expected? Most importantly, does the store serving its purpose ? Before answering these questions, I must admit that the app model is an excellent idea. However, it needs more time to mature. Also it’s crucial that the product team support more APIs to serve the continuous growing need of the App providers.

Instead of answering the above questions, I will throw some facts and numbers which will somehow will construct an indirect answer to above questions.

All the numbers and stats below are retrieved as per the available information published on the Office Store at the moment of writing this article. I will focus mainly on "Apps for SharePoint" as it’s the biggest portion of the store right now with total of 836 apps which is almost 63.6% of the Office Store capacity.

The number of the app providers is 378 providers. This means that the store has an average of 2.2 Apps per App provider. The interesting stat is more than 55% of the providers have only single app published. Why the last state is interesting? In my humble opinion, this either shows the lack of dedication from the providers towards the platform or simply the providers realize that building a SharePoint App and publish it to the Office Store is a low RO
I exercise.
The majority of the apps within the Office Store apps for SharePoint are free apps, the below pie chart describes the number of free apps vs. paid.



 It’s normal to see Productivity, communication and Content Management in the top 5 categories but finding Site Design ranked as fourth was a little surprising for me, as Microsoft is pushing the customization to be outside of the Office365 platform and recommending branding customization to be minimal.
Finally, if the office store didn’t get the needed attention from Microsoft, this might put an end to the app model in favor of the new Office365 APIs.
The above article is just my own interpretation for the numbers gathered at the time of writing this article.