With over two thirds of users choosing to be billed through their mobile phone account, and 90% of users able to use their own language, it’s getting harder and harder for everyone to ignore theOvi Store. It’s on an upward curve of adoption by users, developers and networks, and now welcomes China into the Top Ten list of active countries.
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The nay sayers will of course also quickly claim that of those 1.6m downloads plenty/majority/"almost all!" are ring tones, themes etc. so it would be great if you guys could try to dig up some rough shares of apps vs. other content. Personally, I don't think its that important/interesting as if I was a developer I would be thrilled to know I can push through cheap and quick to develop content such as ring tones and themes through Ovi. But the nay sayers will of course disagree and claim that Nokia is doomed as "virtually all developers have left Symbian"... 😃
I am not entirely convinced by your analysis. To me these numbers speak a different language:
- Jan: 'almost 1m downloads a day'
- Feb: 'around 1,5 m downloads a day'
- March: no figures
- April: 1,6m downloads a day
to me that suggests a significant slowing down of the growth, despite (I assume) more application friendly Nokia touch screen phones in the market, i.e. the one he says there are the most downloads for. And Nokia also does not disclose the overall number of applications, probably because they pale in comparison to the competition. At least on my N97 I have not seen many interesting new additions to the ovi store in the last months.
In balance, therefore, I would be cautious to read a strong growth out of these PR numbers...
I read that popular models have around 9,5 K items in Ovi. How much of that is of high quality, I do not know. I see your point on the slowing down of download number. However, I think that, considering the extent to which the ecosystem has been rolled out now, there is tremendous growth ahead. The real volume comes from handsets that are middle to low end. Nokia is only now pushing with handsets that have all ovi services pre installed. The mere fact that this year another 440 million phones will be pushed out by them solidifies that assumption. Also, MM Ovi, just announced in China will push this further. Yesterday Tomi Ahonen (sp?) tweeted on the topic, and he also thinks Ovi store will grow to tower of the competition. I really think they will win this.
I have an E71 and while I am grateful that Nokia breathed new life into this model by making voice guided navigation free my experience with Ovi Store has just been fustrating. I downloaded the facebook app for the E71/72 from the store and it proved to be be a acceptable app nothing too stellar yet not totally useless. I am not a real heavy facebook user I use it casually so the app did to get much use. I decided to try it again one day and it refused to open. Okay went to the app manager and uninstalled the app. Next onto Ovi Store to get the re-download the app. The grey bar that you need to highlight to download the app refuses to cooperate. Fine then I will reboot my phone and I don't recalled if I needed to uninstall the Ovi Store and reboot again but I got the app back. Alright then all is well. Atleast for a while. A couple weeks pass and I open the app again and I get this message saying something to the effect that the app cannot be opened please rebooting handset may help. Ok I tried that. Did not work. Went back uninstalled app then back to Ovi Store and guess what unable to download the app because the download tab cannot be highlighted. This is just unacceptable. And to add insult to injury supposedly this app
which is intended for E71/72 can be downloaded to other handsets (have not even bothered to test out my N82) meanwhile my E71 is unable to do so. So now I just plain avoid the Ovi Store. Point is that if I install something from what is an official Nokia sanction source Ovi Store I expect it to work. I mena this app was not on Nokia betalabs or on some obscure 3rd party site.
Ned Sarm wrote:I have an E71 and while I am grateful that Nokia breathed new life into this model by making voice guided navigation free my experience with Ovi Store has just been fustrating. I downloaded the facebook app for the E71/72 from the store and it proved to be be a acceptable app nothing too stellar yet not totally useless. I am not a real heavy facebook user I use it casually so the app did to get much use. I decided to try it again one day and it refused to open. Okay went to the app manager and uninstalled the app. Next onto Ovi Store to get the re-download the app. The grey bar that you need to highlight to download the app refuses to cooperate. Fine then I will reboot my phone and I don't recalled if I needed to uninstall the Ovi Store and reboot again but I got the app back. Alright then all is well. Atleast for a while. A couple weeks pass and I open the app again and I get this message saying something to the effect that the app cannot be opened please rebooting handset may help. Ok I tried that. Did not work. Went back uninstalled app then back to Ovi Store and guess what unable to download the app because the download tab cannot be highlighted. This is just unacceptable. And to add insult to injury supposedly this app
which is intended for E71/72 can be downloaded to other handsets (have not even bothered to test out my N82) meanwhile my E71 is unable to do so. So now I just plain avoid the Ovi Store. Point is that if I install something from what is an official Nokia sanction source Ovi Store I expect it to work. I mena this app was not on Nokia betalabs or on some obscure 3rd party site.
That sucks, but it also strengthens my points. Nokia are having this succes while still needing to solve issues like this. Imagine if all of these issues are ironed out and a multitude of devices including Ovi hit the market...
viipottaja wrote:as if I was a developer I would be thrilled to know I can push through cheap and quick to develop content such as ring tones and themes through Ovi
Would you be so thrilled if you spent 6 months developing an app that few people ever saw because the front page was full of ringtones? The more content you have, the less visibility (and therefore downloads and sales) each item will get. Which doesn't encourage people / companies to spend large amounts of time on development. It's a fine balancing act between quality and variety.
Ned Sarm wrote:I mena this app was not on Nokia betalabs or on some obscure 3rd party site.
I think people need to have a clearer line between Ovi's responsibilities and the developers.
If the application crashes / fails to start, that's the developer's problem, not Ovi's. There's only so much verification Ovi can do, and as you say the app worked fine for several weeks (I've been using the same app without any problems on an E71).
Equally, if the app fails to download / payment fails / etc, that's Ovi's problem. As an app developer (Tweets60 and Battery Extender) we receive numerous emails from people who have had issues purchasing / downloading from the Ovi Store. There's nothing we can do about this. The analogy would be if you bought a Playstation from Amazon and they failed to deliver it, you wouldn't complain to Sony. A lot of people seem to think that the developers work for Nokia or we have direct control of the Ovi Store.
I understand your point that Nokia or whichever distributor of apps/mobilewares cannot test every single app submitted by a developer to see how it performs under different facets. My issue with the Ovi Store is that I am can not easily reacquire this particular app. I am quite certain that if I unistall Ovi Store or a worst do a hard reset that the app will be enabled again. Quite honestly I am not going to do that. I think for a normal user ( ie someone who does not read techblogs) this would be quite fustrating and that is the audience that Nokia should be really aiming to please. My solution to the problem I have is to use joikuspot on the E71 with my iPod touch. This arrangement is a bit cumbersome and I don't always have the iPod touch with me. I have been thinking about buying the Nexus One but I am not sure if they even have something comparable to Best Profiles (is this even in the Ovi Store?) which I absolutely cannot do with out plus the full version of quickoffice which I use everyday.
andynugent wrote:Would you be so thrilled if you spent 6 months developing an app that few people ever saw because the front page was full of ringtones? The more content you have, the less visibility (and therefore downloads and sales) each item will get. Which doesn't encourage people / companies to spend large amounts of time on development. It's a fine balancing act between quality and variety.
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A valid comment but ironically perhaps at this point more relevant for stores that have a TON of content overall and a TON of apps in particular (yeah, that fruity store for example). First, at least on my N900 (don't have a S60/Symbian device to test the store on it at hand right now) the front page (I gather you mean the "Recommended for you" tab) is always a mix of things, including several real apps, not just ringtones/themes/videos. 2) the tabs on Ovi Store (like I'd imagine on any app store pretty much) make it very easy to separate out apps only (so them being drowned by themes/ring tones does not really happen for a user that is looking for an app). And, 3) less importantly, right now a developer may well be better of with a store that has less apps for the time being - look at how Rovio has had more downloads of Angry Birds on the tiny little N900/Maemo store.. 😃 So I would guess the real worry/challenge is more about being able to stand out among the sea of apps (not content overall).. All reports on the iPhone App store seem to confirm that - most developers are stuggling to make good business in it despite the humongous download numbers.
Indeed, a tricky balance to get it right for all parties involved! 😊
viipottaja wrote:A valid comment but ironically perhaps at this point more relevant for stores that have a TON of content overall and a TON of apps in particular (yeah, that fruity store for example).
Yes, I completely agree with you that standing out in the Ovi Store is a lot easier than certain other stores. But I think the drive to have x thousand apps (which Ovi was originally very keen on) will in the long term mean that small to medium sized companies won't be able to justify large projects, as they'll have very little chance of recovering their costs.
Even now, there are numerous "apps" in the Ovi Store that are either a font (shouldn't they be under customisations?) or simply a shortcut to a mobile friendly webpage. So you still need to hope that your app stands out from these.
The real issue for Symbian is that it takes a lot longer to get anything done on S60. You can knock together an iPhone app with lots of nice features (pretty lists, embedded web browsers, Google maps, etc.) in a fraction of the time. Hopefully Qt will go someway to address this, but as it stands I can see the percentage of non-trivial apps in the Ovi Store decreasing. Which then just feeds the problem.
I recently have had 2 N97 phones replaced due to faulty hardware and now have an N97 mini. With hard resets and reinstalls from the OVI store, I reintsalled apps a lot. I stuck with Nokia because I had bought apps in the OVI store. Nokia don't advertise that you can only download apps 5 times! Which I found out I had reached when trying to install my apps on my new N97 mini. I thought when I upgrade my phone, my apps that I bought would be useable on my new phone, well only if you downloaded them less than 5 times, and can you tell howmany times you have downloaded them, ANSWER NO NO NO.
So is the OVI store really making me stick with Nokia, when there is great chance when I buy my new Symbian 3 phone that the apps will have gone past the magic 5 times downloaded limit? Not having my apps has damaged my brand loyalty to Nokia, and now I will not buy and more apps in the OVI store. Will I stick with NOKIA next time?? I don't know my apps in the app store are lost to me already, so probably no.
Allaboutsymbian, can you guys lobby for this 5 download limit to be changed?? It is bad for OVI and it is bad for Nokia and bad for the consumer!
Maybe I'm just not getting the point, but comparing Ovi to Apple's app store seems like an exercise in futility, but not because of the different levels of downloads. It's more because when I look at the Apple adverts for all their apps, I see 14 of the 16 they proudly announce are catered for by websites accessible on every other platform.
So why would I want to download the app? Surely the whole internet trend is to have access to everything via the cloud, which is probably more important with mobile devices as the profile of local computing and electrical power mean that it is unadvisable to do it all on the device?
Anyway, app stores are more like supermarkets to me, and it's always the customer and the supplier that suffer when there are problems.