The Windows Phone Marketplace is now offering 40,000 apps and it is growing by a rate of 165 apps a day.

It seems Redmond’s mobile OS is finally getting some traction from consumers and developers alike, but it still has a long way to go before it can match Apple’s or Google’s app portfolio.

A total of 10,882 apps were submitted in the last three months, which is a great improvement considering the rather slow start late last year. The marketplace carried about 8,000 apps in January 2011, so it has grown fivefold in under a year. Most of the new apps, some 68 percent, are free.

However, despite strong growth Windows Phone still has a lot of catching up to do. Apple currently has some 460,000 apps on offer, while Google boasts around 320,000.

In any case Windows Phone is slowly but surely emerging as a serious contender in the smartphone market and it will be interesting to see how things work out for Microsoft in 2012.

More here.