Nokia Ovi Store at 3m, still trailing others

Nokia today said that the Ovi Store had reached a symbolic milestone of three million downloads per day. The new rate is a sharp increase from 2.3 million in October. About 165 million people worldwide have used the store.

The company stressed that most visits were for activity, as 90 percent had downloaded an app. Each known user gets about 2.6 downloads, and 92 developers have over one million app downloads.

The increases are important for Nokia, which was left behind in the major shift to smartphone apps, but still leave a significant gap. As of early September, iTunes app downloads reached about 17.28 million per day and were already covering 160 million iTunes account holders despite considerably shorter reach. Nokia is available in almost every country where Apple sells in several dozen, although Apple focuses mostly on larger nations.

Most of Nokia's problems have stemmed from a complicated development process. Until the arrival of Qt and recent streamlining efforts, those writing for Symbian, Maemo and now MeeGo had to write using separate tools. They still have to write for a wildly varying product range that has a mixture of capacitive and resistive touchscreens as well as non-touch devices with different button layouts. Many apps as a consequence either have to accommodate many different control systems or limit sales to a fraction of devices.

Android has faced similar control challenges but has had touchscreen support from the start and has a common development set from the start, helping it get to 100,000 apps.

By Electronista Staff

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iPhone, industry, Symbian, Nokia, Android, Ovi, App Store, mobile phones, Maemo, Qt, Apple, MeeGo