Nokia Ovi Store Hitting 2.3 Million Downloads Daily
Over 2.3 million downloads daily from Nokia’s Ovi Store is timely good news for the Symbian OS, after both Sony Ericsson and Samsung have deserted the platform
Apps shop, the Ovi Store is more than catching on, it is racking up some considerable figures, Nokia claimed. Part of the Ovi internet environment, the Ovi Store now facilitates 2.3 million downloads per day, which is good news for the Symbian mobile phone operating system.
Nokia’s answer to the Apple App Store, the Ovi Store opened in late May 2009 and it still signs up over 200,000 people each day.
Good News Follows Bad
Sadly, the news arrived on a day when Samsung, following the lead of Sony Ericsson, announced it will discontinue support for the Symbian platform at the end of this year. Even Nokia has announced that its new N8 smartphone will be the last in its series to run Symbian, though it will still be available on E- and C-series phones.
“With a generation of amazing devices, like the Nokia N8, developers are looking at Ovi as a good business decision and a chance to innovate and create next-generation mobile experiences for our family of new Symbian smartphones,” Tero Ojanperä, executive vice president of Nokia Services, said in a statement.
Ojanperä’s comment – and the announcement that more than 70 developers and publishers have now surpassed the one million downloads mark for their Ovi Store content – comes as Nokia has begun shipping the N8. This is the company’s newest flagship smartphone and a device that it hopes will keep it on top in the high-end device market, which has been gradually turning to Android franchise smartphones, RIM BlackBerry and the Apple iPhone.
The N8 is the first Nokia handset to run the third version of the Symbian operating system. Symbian 3 comes additionally with the Qt software development environment. Nokia hopes this will prove to be a lure for developers, as it enables them to create an application once and deploy it across desktop, mobile and embedded platforms without rewriting the source code.
Enhancements to the Qt Software Development Kit have resulted in a “70 percent reduction in the number of lines of code required when developing for the company’s family of Symbian smartphones,” Nokia said in its statement. Which is good news for developers around the world.
In China, India and Indonesia, 4.7 million users have subscribed to agricultural, educational and entertainment services in Ovi Life Tools. And Nokia is the largest single source of digital downloaded music revenue in Brazil, Mexico, India, Finland and South America.
“At Nokia, we believe that connecting people with great mobile experiences is at the heart of what Ovi is all about,” said Ojanperä.
An updated Ovi Store experience will be debuting on the N8 and later arriving on a full range of Symbian smartphones.
