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Stats reveal growth of the company's app store
Nokia has announced that its Ovi Store is now generating 1.5 million downloads a day - a figure which presumably includes wallpapers and ringtones as well as applications.
The average registered user has downloaded 12 apps since the store's launch last May.
Impressive? Well, according to AdMob's most recent metrics report, iPhone and Android users are downloading nine apps a month on average.
More stats from Nokia: Ovi Store now works on more than 100 handsets, more than 60 of which are Symbian smartphones. And new user registrations doubled in February compared to January.
Meanwhile, new registered users AND downloads were both up more than 100% between January and February.
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Plus, the store is currently seeing 22 downloads per second, with daily highs of 1,300 downloads a minute. That compares to figures given by Nokia's Niklas Savander at Mobile World Congress of 15 downloads per second and highs of 1,000 downloads a minute.
The company also says its top ten countries in terms of downloads are - sorted alphabetically rather than by number of downloads - France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UK and Vietnam.
An intriguing mix of big Western countries and emerging markets. Ovi Store is regularly compared disparagingly to iPhone's App Store, but its value to app developers could be about its popularity in countries where iPhone isn't hugely popular.
Well it's great to brag about number of downloads, but given that they are most likely 99.9% free downloads, doesn't make Nokia richer.
It's like if Vodafone was saying "call for free, unlimited", and would brag about having 50 million customers thanks to it. Where's the performance in that, especially given the few 100 millions of handsets they have on the market?
MobileGuy certainly points out the need for a better question -- what about business unit revenue? Charging for downloads is one-sided business model thinking. Synergy and revenues can come from multiple sides. Downloads mean eyeballs are browsing screen real estate -- and scale in eyeballs and impressions can attract advertising on the upstream side of a business. Search and recommendation can be influenced by sponsorship revenues and other tricks from the Google playbook.
