Nokia Launches Ovi Store – Does It Match Up To Apple’s Store?
Nokia has soft launched the much anticipated online content and software store known as Ovi Store. Earlier on WATBlog we have emphasized on the importance of Ovi for Nokia. The roll out began with Australia and will be launched globally soon. Ovi Store will host various Applications, Games, Widgets for mobile devices. Ovi will also help users to share their photos, music with their friends and also helps them reach their destinations with the help of maps. Users can also sync their contacts and files using OVI without worrying about loosing contacts ever. This store is started by nokia after seeing the huge success of Apple App Store with more than billion application downloads in a year.
Ovi Store is aimed to bridge the gap between the users and content providers by providing them a platform to reach users easily. Publishers can publish their content like Mobile Applications, Games etc using Ovi Publish . Publishers will have to share 30% of their revenue with Nokia . Ovi Store is open both for free and commercial applications.
This will also help Nokia to dive into a new business model of getting revenue from mobile content and mobile Internet service thus helping Nokia cope with the slowing demand of Mobile Phone and declining numbers. Nokia sells around 400 million phones a year in comparison to 20 million phones by Apple which may give Nokia an edge over Apple and find a new source of revenue.
One interesting feature at Ovi Store is user recommendations and social element where user can recommend an application and can see what others have recommended thus saving the time to try out an application and finding it useless.
Now the big question..
Can it compete with Apple Store?
Nokia seemed to be following the footsteps of Apple in launching the store but it had missed the publicity which Apple had when it launched the Apple Store. There are very few applications available for download as of now (around 700) in Ovi store. Nokia has launched various Applications like Gravity (A Twitter Client), Trapster(that helps avoiding a speeding ticket and gives information about hot spots and crowd sources) etc which can catch the user attention.
Does it have future potential?
Ovi Store seems to have lot of potential in future as the number of Nokia Mobile users is far greater than Apple Iphone users. Nokia need to target both the high end and mid end mobile phones to make Ovi Store a success as Nokia has a larger number of mid end phones then high end ones Nokia may also face technical issues targeting huge lineup of devices which was not the case with Apple. There seems lot of potential in the Ovi Store but the huge lineup of devices will come as a barrier both for content developers and users. Content developers will have to customize their applications for every device making application development a tedious and less rewarding process.
Nokia have to address the issue of seamless application development and deployment to make Ovi Store a success.
According to Research Firm, Strategy Analytics the value of Mobile Content market including downloadable games, ring tones, mobile browsing will grow by 15% to $79 billion. Looking into this it seems Nokia has taken a wise step to start a new source of revenue by providing a platform to share mobile content and services.
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“seems to have lot of potential in future as the number of Nokia Mobile users is far greater than Apple Iphone users.”
You are quite right about that. Ultimately the large user base is a big advantage, which gives them a headstart over many others.
Also, rather than take Apple head on for the content and app in the higher end of the spectrum (Apple has taken years to perfect web and desktop apps) … I wonder if Nokia should try and find applications more suited for medium/ low end phones … and non-internet enabled phones … and create a strong defensible area for themselves … may be mobile-email integration, value added services etc.
What Nokia fails to understand is that App Store isn’t making big bucks for Apple. But it helps them safeguard iPhone’s marketshare with some killer apps and add amazing value to the iPod Touch that even the ZuneHD cannot catchup with.
Sridhar, you are dead right! Nokia should look to launch apps for low end phones and extend their lead there. At the same time look to enhance the smartphone offerings.
Cheers
Probably not yet completely clear what the implications of the apple store is. It certainly is not for apps developers to make money selling apps. Could be the true benefit is motivating people to buy the phones for which it works, enabling users to enhance their own mobile experiences. Key, however, is figuring out how to get developers to write for Nokia. The most popular apps, like Pocket Express, need motivation to invest in the platform.