Sales & Business Development Manager
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Nokia's much-maligned app store being rebuilt from the ground up
Nokia's Ovi Store is currently generating nearly one million downloads a day, according to George Linardos, the company's VP of Product, Media.
However, the company has already been working on a completely rebuilt version of the store, which is due to be launched next year.
“We're doing just under one million downloads a day, and our download numbers are growing 100% month-on-month,” said Linardos, at a roundtable event in London to discuss the company's app strategy with journalists.
However, he also said that the current iteration of the Ovi Store has always been intended as a stopgap measure, designed originally to consolidate Nokia's various content distribution initiatives – Download, MOSH and WidSets.
“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 calling 2.0,” said Linardos.
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“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. So it'll probably be about 75% from scratch, and three or four months after that it will be 100%.”
Ovi Store 2.0's key improvements will focus on speed, user interface and reliability. For the full report on today's roundtable, click here.
EDIT: Nokia clarified at the end of the roundtable event - after this story was published - that 2.0 is not the official term for what's being launched in Spring. It's more of a refresh, or 'replatforming'.
One could say Nokia rushed the Ovi launch to keep pace with Apple et al and that v2.0 is therefore to be expected, but on the other hand you could argue that it's taken them forever to get just this far - via Club Nokia, Download!, Preminet, MOSH, N-Gage.
Nokia continues to be an expert at delivering high quality excuses instead of high quality services. Can you imagine any executive at Apple speaking in this way? All Apple does is deliver, apparently Nokia just promises to deliver--sometime in the future, which is why they are being passed by. How many strike outs should they get before the game is over?
Here's some highlights from an investor meeting audio QA Nokia posted on their investor relations website:
"Tero Ojanperä, Michael Halbherr, Marco Argenti, Tom Furlong & Jyrki Rosenberg, Services Q&A"
http://cmd.nokia.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=107224&p=irol-hosted
(via: http://www.intomobile.com/2009/12/03/audio-the-most-painful-question-and-answer-session-nokia-has-ever-had-to-go-through-ovi-store.html)
# 500 items being added a day
# 75% of daily traffic is return traffic
# $1M USD sales per day
# Average downloads per user is 9.5
# 57 Mobile Operators in 17 languages
It's great to see Nokia doing well. In order to evaluate the download volume of an App Store accurately, it's important to ask whether the downloads are apps, or whether the numbers include apps combined with ringtones, wallpapers, music downloads, and other high traffic content. Apple, GetJar, Blackberry app world and most others measure themselves on app downloads, simply because the technical process of matching phones to the right versions, downloading large app files over shaky carrier networks, getting the app to install, run, register, and work, is a much more complex process than downloading a ringtone or a wall paper. The public may not get this, but anyone who works in mobile does get it.
