Nokia to rebuild Ovi Store from scratch in 2010
Published: 14 December, 2009
READ MORE: Nokia | App Store | Mobile Content | Linux | Symbian
Nokia's Ovi Store has been building up developer support and user downloads rapidly over the past weeks, but is still attracting mixed reviews, and a lower level of profile than Android Market or the market leader App Store. Now the Finnish firm says it is working to rebuild the store, to create a far more radical and fully fledged platform, insisting that the current shopfront was always intended to be something of an interim step on the way to Nokia's ambitious web services vision.
The reworking of Ovi Store is in line with the handset leader's broader strategy to unleash the full force of its mobile services platform in the course of 2010, along with new devices, some running the more web-oriented Maemo Linux-based operating system. The products that have appeared in 2009 are just a stepping stone to test the market and start to build interest and feedback, insist Nokia executives, and its new software platform will be further boosted in the second half of 2010, with the release of a much enhanced user interface for Symbian - which will itself appear in its upgraded and newly open source form.
Speaking at a roundtable in London, Nokia's VP of media products, George Linardos, said Nokia would open the revamped Ovi Store in the spring, promising high speeds, greater reliability and the new user interface. By contrast, the priorities in 2009 had been to bring together existing services like the Mosh social network and the MusicStore into a common portal, to build carrier relationships, and to implement key benefits like operator billing.
"We're doing just under 100m downloads a day, and our download numbers are growing 100% month-on-month," Linardos told Mobile Entertainment. "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."
Although some of the current elements of Ovi Store will be retained, the new version will be built largely from scratch, hence the long wait - one that Nokia says will be worthwhile, as the store will leapfrog all the existing rivals, introducing some "radical new concepts", as one executive put it, without going into details. Linardos echoed the theme, saying the new store, as seen in spring, would be about 75% brand new, and a subsequent iteration in the summer would be 100% from scratch.
Meanwhile, Android Market has been criticized on many platforms for not supporting carrier billing, which many reports have found are a key differentiator for many consumers. T-Mobile USA is addressing the issue and is now pushing out a software update enabling Android device customers to bill their Market purchases directly to their account instead of entering credit card information (although the credit card option will remain available).
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