On October 26th, the day Windows 8 officially launched to the masses, the Windows Store had about 9,000 apps available for download according to third party sources. Microsoft has so far not given out its own official stats of how many apps have been published via the Windows Store, but today another third party site claims that there are now over 35,000 apps for Windows 8 available for the OS's users to download.

The information comes from MetroStore Scanner, which allows non-Windows 8 PC users to check out what's available in the Windows Store in a web browser. The 35,000 number is a worldwide app count; the site shows that the US market currently has over 22,000 local Windows 8 apps.

As McAkins Online points out, the number of Windows 8 apps in the store is about equal to the number of apps published in the Windows Phone Store in its first year. In the US, there are over 18,000 free Windows 8 apps, versus over 4,000 paid apps.

Of course, lots of people play the numbers game and while the Windows Store seems to be off to a good start, the most important thing is the quality of the apps rather than the quantity. We will also point out that a number of major apps are still missing from the store, including official apps for Facebook and Twitter, although the later is working on their Windows 8 app for release in the near future.