Nokia’s Ovi Store has not, it’s fair to say, been a roaring success since its launch in May.

Initial teething troubles could be put down to technical gremlins, but the months since have seen consumers complaining about the store’s poor user experience, while developers groused about its mechanics – and the fact that they weren’t making much money from it.

The contrast with iPhone’s App Store – a contrast that’s been made constantly – isn’t flattering. That said, few app stores come off well in such a comparison. There is no shortage of developers complaining about Android Market, even if it hasn’t faced a consumer backlash on the scale of Ovi Store.

Still, this is why ME and three other UK journalists are sat round a table in London with George Linardos, whose job title at Nokia is VP, Product, Media. Man In Charge Of Sorting The Ovi Store Out would be another way of putting it.

He spoke candidly, on and off the record, about the problems with Ovi Store and the challenges Nokia faced getting it up and running, as well as talking about how the company is trying to fix these issues and compete with rival platforms.

Starting with the reason Ovi Store is as it is now. “We had this jambalaya of services – Download, MOSH, WidSets,” he says.

“Looking at them, it was a very obvious decision that we needed to consolidate one place for consumers to go on our phones, put the full weight of our distribution behind it, and provide a single point of entry for publishers.”

Fateful decision

This, according to Linardos, was before Apple had launched its App Store. He says that Nokia faced two choices at the time: to build a new platform for its single apps store from scratch, or to take an “interim approach” of using some of the components of its existing platforms to get up and running quickly – while building the all-new platform in the background.

“That’s the path we took, and that’s the genesis moment of a lot of the issues that we have had since,” he says.

“The over-riding ambition was to consolidate the services, building a single service for consumers and a single point of entry for publishers. Neither would be perfect, but it was as opposed to continuing with the previous fragmented approach. If the market dynamics hadn’t changed, that would possibly have been okay.”

Say again?

“When the decision was made, there was no such thing as the Apple App Store. But when the industry changed around that, suddenly this thing [Ovi Store] has to be judged in terms of ‘is it the definitive competitive response to other app stores. And that’s not what it was necessarily conceived to be at that point – there was always the understanding that this was interim.”

As we said: candid.

Ovi Store fixes

There are two things to understand about events since that initial decision. First: the last six months has seen Nokia firefighting with the current ‘interim’ version of the Ovi Store, fixing bugs and introducing features like search and re-downloading that should probably have been there from the beginning.

“We’ve had engineers working around the clock, fixing search and re-downloads, stabilizing the system and finding speed improvements so we can scale this business up,” says Linardos.

He says the changes – as well as the rollout of the Ovi Store client on new Nokia handsets – have had a direct impact on the store’s performance. In early September, the company revealed Ovi Store had generated just 10 million downloads in its first three months. Now, the numbers have increased significantly.

“We're doing just under one million downloads a day, and our download numbers are growing 100% month-on-month,” says Linardos. “We’re seeing high conversion rates when we ship out of the box [i.e. the Ovi Store client is preloaded], and more importantly high loyalty rates.”

Next-gen revamp

The second thing to understand about the original decision to launch Ovi Store as an interim platform is that it was just that: interim. Nokia is planning a major relaunch of the store in the coming months.

“All the while there's been this new platform being built in the background, which we'll be talking about in the next couple of months and launching in the Spring with what we're [internally] calling 2.0,” he says. “It will take us to the level of scalability that will make us highly competitive.”

Is it completely rebuilt from the ground up?

“It's being built from scratch with a few legacy components, which will be phased out over the course of 2.1 and 2.2,” he says. “So it'll probably be about 75% from scratch, and three or four months after that it will be 100%.”

The key improvements noticed by users will apparently be speed, user interface and reliability, although Nokia is keeping its powder dry on exactly how the UI will evolve for now.

High expectations

In many ways, the biggest problem for Ovi Store has been one of high expectations on the part of the industry and consumers.

Those expectations were partly raised by Apple’s efforts, but also by Nokia’s own rhetoric when it first announced its store – promising 50 million compatible handsets from day one, and innovative social-location recommendation features.

“That speech wasn’t saying day one [on the features],” stresses Linardos. “It was very specifically positioned as ‘this is the vision’. A lot of those things are built and sitting on the servers, but as somebody who can say ‘release the hounds from the servers!’ I don’t want to do that until the core use is polished.”

We’ll be hearing a lot about ‘relevance’ when those Ovi Store 2.0 hounds are released, though. Linardos says Nokia will be making more efforts to feature specific content on the Ovi Store’s homepage – but tailoring these featured picks by country, device and language.

But that doesn’t mean the recommendations won’t then be a big part of it. It sounds like the refreshed Ovi Store may finally deliver on those original promises of better, more relevant recommendations.

“We’ve talked a lot about this, but while we’ve put pieces of the recommendation engine into the current platform, we haven’t put the full thing in,” says Linardos.

“We’ve had a number of really top experts in the field working on this. We went out and really invested in some expertise. If you’ve followed things like the Netflix Prize, you’ll know how complex really true recommendation is. We’ve been working extensively on that.”

Developers, developers, developers

However, Linardos admits that a faster, slinkier, more reliable Ovi Store will be nothing without great apps and content for its customers to find.

This is another problem for Nokia though: it’s hard to find mobile games and app developers with many good words to say about the store in comparison to iPhone’s App Store. Meanwhile, Big Media companies remain resolutely iTunnel-visioned when it comes to smartphone platforms.

Linardos doesn’t make any chest-beating statements about why any of these companies should be investing more in the Ovi Store, although he does say that small developers are finding success – like the one-man firm behind Twitter app Gravity – while larger publishers like EA are backing the store.

However, both these examples show problems with the Ovi Store and its ecosystem in their current form. Gravity developer Jan Ole Suhr had well-publicised problems after the app disappeared from Ovu Store abruptly, while EA is distributing Java games through Ovi Store, but investing far more in the development of native iPhone titles.

Linardos accepts that Nokia’s job is to eliminate the procedural issues that led to the Gravity mix-up, while scaling up the store and its platform to make it worth EA and other big media companies’ while investing more in the content they sell on Ovi Store.

“Big media companies and big publishers are never going to just shut down to us entirely,” he says. “It’s not like they’re making a decision at this time to support certain platforms and that’s their business going forward. They’re investing their money for the next six months, but this is going to play out over a number of years.”

Making money

Nokia’s challenge is to prove to publishers that they can make significant revenues from the Ovi Store. Linardos says that Nokia’s decision to make its Nokia Services division a P&L business will help drive this – the company is looking to make money from the store, rather than simply use apps as a way to sell more handsets (the not-so-hidden subtext to this is that Apple is doing just that).

“Our interests are aligned in making developers successful, not just creating some ‘wow’ and then having them make us successful in terms of selling devices,” he says. “You’re not going to see us driving price points down as far as possible.”

Nokia is also working on providing better analytics to Ovi Store developers, while introducing operator billing in more countries – it’s currently enabled with 50 operators, up from 27 at launch. Other payment models will also be introduced.

“We’re going to be doing in-app payments – it’s in the works,” says Linardos. “We’ve done try-and-buy for a number of years, and you see much more attachment and conversion with that kind of model than the straight a la carte model.”

Catching Apple

Even so, he accepts that Apple has made most of the running in the apps space so far, particularly when it comes to creating the sense of new experiences – the sense that has attracted so many media companies to the App Store.

“They hit the ball out of the park, and if I thought this was a game played over six months, you’d call it game, set and match,” he says.

“But this is an inflection point, where this is going from early adopter to mainstream. It’s the start of a period where mobile really comes into its own. We’re in a position to play this two, five and ten years into the future.”

Even so, while Linardos readies the hounds on the Ovi Store revamp, the company’s focus needs to be rooted in the present, too, fixing the current issues with the store and managing the expectations of consumers and developers.

“We have screens in the office with the Twitter feeds running all day long, and it’s like constantly getting punched in the face!” he says. “The list of To Dos has never been more obvious.”