Ovi Store - Nokia

Ovi Store clicks for Nokia:

Barely a year old, Nokia Ovi Store has six Indian developers clocking more than a million downloads

Who says Apple’s App store is the only platform to make money from mobile apps — that’s a question application developers have begun to ask. Apps (short for applications) are programmes like games or utility tools that can be run on smartphones.

Six Indian developers have reportedly clocked over one million downloads on the Nokia Ovi Store and India is already among the top three countries, in terms of download.

“Purely by volumes, Ovi store is a lucrative store to be part of. For example, most of our downloads have come from Nokia 5800 XpressMusic device users, which is a sub-10k device,” said Vishal Gondal, CEO of Indiagames. The company is one of the six Indian developers that tracked one million downloads.

Indiagames has seen over 10 million app downloads on Ovi store of which a “major chunk” is from India. “Mobile users in India have begun to buy apps (free and paid) over mobile phones and with 3G coming I am confident of smartphone users increasing their app downloads,” said Gondal.

Most of the app developers in India work with several applications stores, including, Apple, Blackberry and Android App stores. But what probably is working for Nokia is its market share and the volume it has, especially in markets like India.

Since the Ovi Store was launched as part of Nokia’s broader Ovi services last year, 92 developers, globally, have seen more than one million downloads for the apps and more than 400,000 developers have signed up to contribute to the store.

To add to the momentum, the Finnish mobile vendor launched Qt Software Development Toolkit (SDK), that is used by developers to create Ovi apps. The toolkit was downloaded 1.5 million times as developers could improve the speed and efficiency of creating apps for mobile devices, including smartphones such as the new Nokia N8 and Nokia C7 (on its way to India), and the recently announced Nokia E7.

“We also announced unified application development around the Qt framework to simplify creating apps for Symbian-based devices and products that will be powered by the new MeeGo operating system,” said Tero Ojanperä, executive vice-president (Services), Nokia.

According to data released by Nokia, the Ovi Store software is downloaded three million times every day, up from two million in September. That projects to one billion downloads per year. To provide a perspective, 1.3 billion people worldwide use Nokia devices, though not all can run Ovi Store, which is limited to Nokia phones introduced over the last few years (such as Nokia S40 and S60 devices).

So what does Nokia get out of this? Most app stores typically share 70 per cent of app revenue with the developer, while the rest goes to the store. Apple’s iPhone App store is the longest-standing in the market, having opened in July 2008. It was followed by the Android app store and BlackBerry App World store, which opened in February and April 2009 respectively. Without breaking up the downloads numbers, Nokia claims that countries like China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UK and Vietnam have shown active downloads from its Ovi store where games take top place in paid downloads.

“The rapid growth on Ovi Store to pass the one billion annualised download mark demonstrates that Nokia is a competitor in both scale and size when it comes to its services. With Nokia’s stronger focus on the Qt platform and improved developer ecosystem, Nokia should continue to see its developer numbers increase as developers see profit from new revenue shares, operator billings and the ever-growing user base around the world.” said Scott Ellison, vice president of mobile and consumer connected platforms at IDC.

However, competition is catching up. Google’s Android Market that witnessed more than one billion downloads and hosts more than 160,000 apps. Apple’s ubiquitous app store has delivered over 8.5 million apps every day and not to forget Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 that is expected to make its presence felt globally. But Nokia maintains its bullish outlook. “We see Ovi store is on a strong growth path fuelled by new apps and games. We have more than 250,000 new consumers signing up for Ovi every day from across the globe,” claimed Ojanperä.

Chennai-based PR Rajendran, CEO, Nextwave Multimedia – one of the six developers who have seen more than a million downloads for its apps – agreed. “Our games and comics on Ovi crossed one million downloads in less than a year and is growing fast.” Rajendran said Nokia has been actively courting developers for its app store.

Mobile apps and competing storefronts are shackled to the smartphone market. Developers said Nokia’s edge lies in its volumes. “Ovi Store is available on 20 different handsets that include both connected smartphones and cellular feature phones. Nokia still controls about 35 per cent of the world mobile phone market, thanks to the continued popularity of its low-cost feature phones,” said iSuppli analysts who believe that consumer interest in apps is likely to grow faster than the smartphone market in China, India, and Eastern Europe, and that should give Nokia a chance to continue building the Ovi Store.