With software giant Microsoft having recently set a record of sorts by assembling the highest-ever number of developers for a coding marathon in Bangalore, India, it is evident that the company is aware of the significance of developing new apps for its Windows 8 platform.

Since Microsoft currently has a barely 4 percent share of the worldwide smartphone market, it is quite obvious that if the company is looking to increase its smartphone-market share, it will have to make sure that developers come up with numerous new apps for devices running the company's forthcoming Windows 8 OS.

That new apps would be extremely vital to the success of the Windows 8 platform is apparent from analysts' observation that the customers' response to the Windows-based handsets launched thus far has been lukewarm because these handsets had much fewer apps available for them, vis-a-vis those for Apple's iOS or Google's Android OS.

Going by the statistics, the earlier Windows-based phones had just around 1,00,000 apps available for users, as compared to the availability of over 5,00,000 apps for the iOS and the Android.

Meanwhile, in the wake of reports that the 18-hour app development marathon in Bangalore was attended by over 2,500 developers - more than 50 percent of them being students - who developed around 700 apps for the Windows 8 platform, Forrester Research's senior research analyst Sanchit Vir Gogia said: "The only measure of success would be the number of apps developed and hosted on the platform."