I stumbled across the W7AppList.com site today while trying to find the current number of apps available for Windows Phone.

I am not entirely sure how they gather their stats, but their numbers appear to be pretty legitimate.

The site is very well put together and reveals some quite interesting stats and charts showing the rapid growth in the number of apps available for Microsoft’s new Windows Phone platform along with charts illustrating how many apps are free vs. paid-for, number of apps by category, etc.

The site indicates that there are now more than 4300 apps available for Windows Phone 7. That’s 4300 apps in little over 2 months or an average of 2200 new apps per month.

By comparison, Android started out with 167 apps in its marketplace one week after launch (October 2008) and announced it had 5000 apps in July 2009 – some 9 months later. That means Android had an average new app rate of 555 apps per month for it’s first 9 months.

By this measure, if Windows Phone’s Marketplace continues to grow at its current velocity, we’ll see it reach 5000 apps before the end of December 2010 – just 3 months after launch!

Combining these numbers with the impending release of Windows Phone 7.1 which adds copy & paste along with several fixes and improvements, along with the Mid 2011 Windows Phone release codenamed “Mango”: I think it clear to see that Windows Phone has a very bright future. I will not be at all surprised if, in just a couple of years, the three primary mobile handset platforms are Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone.