Windows Phone Marketplace launches in 13 additional countries

ETX Daily Up
Microsoft is launching its Windows Phone Marketplace in 13 new locations in addition to the recently opened China Marketplace (shown here).

Microsoft’s app store for Windows Phones apps and games is launching in Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, Ukraine, and Venezuela, bringing the total number of Windows Phone Marketplace storefronts to 54.

Consumers in these regions can now download apps and games from their local marketplace by reconfiguring their device using the instructions set out on Microsoft’s Support page.

The web versions of the new stores should available from next week.

Consumers in the UAE, Bahrain, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Israel, Thailand, and Vietnam can look forward to stores opening in their regions soon too, said Microsoft’s Mazhar Mohammed in a March 28 post on the company’s Windows Team Blog.

Apple’s App Stores are currently available in over 120 countries with support for more than 40 languages.

In 2011 market researcher Gartner forecast that by 2014 worldwide mobile application store downloads would reach over 185 billion.