There is no such thing as a quiet launch for a transnational company like Nokia. As it rolled out its Ovi Store in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain, the US and the UK, the Ovi Store website was hit by a flood of traffic from all across the world. Curious to see what the competitor to the iPhone App Store was going to look like?even if it hadn?t yet launched in India?I too logged in to find the website struggling to stay up, and often not accessible.
Application Stores like the Ovi Store are marketplaces for mobile software, some serious, some kooky: At the iPhone App Store, available are software which can be used to play music, and emulate the keys of a pianos on the mobile phone touch screen, racing games sense the tilt of the iPhone to determine the direction and acceleration, or even those which reproduce the sound of a kiss or a fart. Business applications include expense trackers, currency converters and contact managers.
Mobile application developers owe a lot to the iPhone. Until around a year and a half ago, they were struggling for success, developing free or paid email readers, mobile Instant Messengers, or multi-purpose mobile applications that allowed searching the Internet, downloading video clips, reading email and news, booking movie or travel tickets. Their reach was limited, the propensity to buy was low, and even if free, money had to be spent on marketing them. With the launch of the iPhone App Store in July last year, all of that changed.
Since its launch, iPhone App Store has developed into a large and lucrative marketplace: according to US based VentureBeat, the iPhone Application stores has over 25,000 applications, has witnessed over 800 million application downloads. Significantly, the software development kit used for making apps has been downloaded over 800,000 times: the interest from the developer community is primarily because many of these applications are paid, and the developers get to keep 30 percent of the money, or monetise their application with advertising.
It?s a win-win situation for everyone: Apple gets a revenue share, and like in case of their music store iTunes which helps sell their music player iPod, the App Store helps sell the iPhone. The developers are happy because they have an opportunity to create nifty little applications that can be made available to almost 30 million iPhone and iPod Touch users. With market efficiencies kicking in, users have the best of applications to choose from, and developers have a large number of buyers to sell to.
The success of the iPhone App Store has led to other companies taking a similar approach: Google announced the Android Market for its Android platform, Microsoft has planned to launch the Windows Marketplace for their mobile platform, Research In Motion recently launched their BlackBerry App World, and then there?s Nokia with its Ovi Store.
Some took the initial interest in the Ovi Store?which received around 15 times the normal traffic?as a precursor to its success. I?m not so sure. With multiple types of handsets and phone operating systems, developing and testing apps for Nokia phones is much more tedious. Buyers wont be happy when a particular application is available for some handsets, but not theirs. The pricing also matters: while searching for a Twitter application called Gravity, I found that costs around 30 percent more at the Ovi Store than on its own website: why should a user pay more?
Finally, the initial experience is key, and Nokia clearly needs to work on the navigation and usability of the store. People who tried to download and buy applications initially weren?t able to; the Nokia Ovi application itself did not install for some on download. Why should I in India, with a Nokia N95 handset, not be able to buy an app from the store? With potentially more consumers, Nokia will have to both keep the buyers happy, and cater to developer needs as well.
The author is the editor of MediaNama.com