But Nick Malaperiman thinks Ovi Store is still important for m-publishers.
Nokia's head of global partner marketing Nick Malaperiman admits that the company has work to do to catch up with Apple's App Store in terms of user experience.
"There's no shame in saying that Apple has done a fantastic job with their user experience, and I suppose we aspire to that," he said at today's M-Publishing conference in London. "They've set the benchmark."
Malaperiman was giving a speech on Nokia's Ovi Store's importance for newspaper and magazine publishers at the one-day conference.
"The global mobile apps economy will be worth $17.5 billion by 2012," said Malaperiman, referring to predictions from Chetan Sharma Consulting.
He said that Nokia sold 250 million devices globally last year with the Ovi Store enabled - that's a quarter of its total handset shipments.
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"Users are downloading at least 12 items from the store," he said. "It's not just a quick in-and-out, it's 'hey I've found an app, let me browse a little bit'."
He was asked how many of those 250 million Ovi-enabled handsets are being sold with data plans. "That's generally a carrier or operator question," he said.
"To my mind, they should be following the path they follow with Android or iPhone."
Malaperiman also said that two thirds of all Ovi Store purchases are through operator billing. However, it's fair to say that there's a lot of free downloads being driven from the store too.
"Free wins by a long, long margin," he said, talking about popularity on Ovi Store.
"Games do sell, but if you've got an app maybe it's not going to sell so much - but you can certainly distribute it through some of our channels."
Malaperiman talked about some of Nokia's partners who help publishers onto Ovi Store, including the Ovi Quick Start program from Starcut, and Handmark - which just launched an Ovi app for London's Evening Standard newspaper.
Malaperiman also outlined some of the upcoming improvements to Ovi Store, including better content discovery, and relevance.
"The new relevance engine is effectively the same thing as Amazon," he said. "If you bought a Harry Potter book, maybe you'd like this Manchester United thing..."
Ovi Store will also be getting beefier DRM tools for publishers.
"We're very aware of the DRM situation," he said. "At the moment we don't sell movies on the store, for example. We need a stronger DRM solution."
Malaperiman was also asked about whether it will introduce new billing models on the Ovi Store.
"We are working on in-app billing to make it very easy to sell additional content. We are working on subscription models as well," he said.
Finally, Malaperiman talked about the importance of the UK for Ovi Store and Nokia devices.
"When you look at the Ovi Store right now, the UK continues to be our biggest market most days and most months," he said. "The UK is our number one territory for apps, by a long way to be honest."
