The Nokia Lumia 920 will run Windows Phone 8. Photo: AFP
Google has no immediate plans to start developing apps for Windows 8 or for Windows Phone 8. The product
management director at Google Apps, Clay Bavor said, in an interview with V3, that: "We are very careful about where we invest and will go where the users are but they are not on Windows Phone or Windows 8...If that changes, we would invest there, of course."
This means that owners of Microsoft's latest smartphones and early adopters of the company's newest PC operating system will not be getting dedicated Gmail, Google Drive, Google Translate or even Google Maps apps, at least in the short term.
Bavor's words will no doubt grate with Microsoft which, also on Wednesday, revelaed that it had been overwhelmed by the response from developers approached to create applications for both its Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 operating systems. In a posting to its official Windows Phone developer Blog, Senior Director for Mobile Platform Services Product Management at Microsoft Todd Brix said: "With the holidays rapidly approaching, I wanted to confirm that the Windows Phone Store will be open for business during the holiday timeframe. Since the launch of Windows Phone 8 in late October, we are experiencing a sustained 40% increase in Windows Phone app submissions. To meet this increase in app submission volume and maintain our certification processing turnaround times for developers, we will have our full staff on-hand throughout the holiday period."
Originally Microsoft had warned developers that it would be scaling down its app approval operations during the holiday season as it expected the volume of apps for submission to fall off towards the end of the year.