| It is our pleasure to release our monthly Distimo Report, based on December 2009 data. |
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This report covers five application stores: Apple App Store, BlackBerry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store and Windows Marketplace for Mobile.
This month’s most important findings are:
You can download the report here. |
| This report was covered on TechCrunch here. |
Updated: No new Ovi Store yet, but free turn-by-turn navigation with Ovi Maps.
Nokia is holding a high-profile press event this Thursday in London. Nokia said the announcement relates to Ovi and there is a lot of noise that they will release the new Nokia Ovi Store. Last December, Nokia’s George Linardos (VP Product & Media) already said Nokia would be launching a complete rehaul of the Ovi Store within months.
Nokia is definitely putting a lot of attention to the press event. So will we see the brand new Ovi Store? Count down with Nokia:
Nokia has started to send out weekly newsletters to all users that have an Ovi Store account. This account is mandatory if you want to download free or paid content from the Ovi Store. In the newsletter Nokia provides application recommendations, based on the following devices: N97, N95, 5800 Xpress Music, E71 and E63.
In this week’s newsletter, 4 applications are promoted, of which 3 paid:
Ovi Store weekly newsletter
It is not completely clear how these applications are selected and if developers have any influence on this. We’ll keep track of the promoted apps in this newsletter to learn more and see the impact on popularity from this app promotion.
Nokia N900
December 31st, we wrote about Nokia Ovi Store showing the first Maemo apps for the N900, which is the first phone running this operating system. Just today Nokia announced that they released Ovi in beta for the N900, offering a collection of hand-picked content.
You can find the store on your N900 in the main menu of your device. Alternatively, you can visit the Ovi Store from your computer and select the N900 from the Nokia Mobile Selector (under All mobiles).
Currently, there are 30 applications available for the device, which are all free. Although Nokia says that there are already paid applications available (among which Documents To Go), we have not been able to find them in the store.
In November, Nokia launched the N900 phone, the first model running Maemo, a Linux based operating system. Nokia plans to launch more phones with Maemo in 2010. It was already expected, but now the signs are very clear: Maemo Applications are coming to the Ovi Store.
The Nokia Ovi Store currently shows the first Maemo apps:
Maemo apps in Nokia Ovi Store
The N900 is not included in the list of supported devices of Ovi Store, but several applications for Nokia’s new platform are already visible. Thanks to Allaboutphones.nl for spotting this.
The Ovi Store now contains 29 Maemo applications, which are all free. It is expected that Nokia will announce full support for Maemo in Ovi Store early January. We updated Appstores.info with these details.
At a roundtable event in London, George Linardos, Nokia’s VP of Product & Media, said that their Ovi Store currently is generating close to 1 million downloads a day. “Download numbers are growing 100% month-on-month”, he said. Currently, the “typical user” downloads 9.5 items, and Nokia is targeting 300 million users in 2011, where they define users as one who has used Nokia’s service once in six months.
Nokia Ovi Store
Additionally, in an interview at Nokia’s Capital Markets Day event the company said that a completely new version of the Ovi Store (2.0) will be launched in the first half of 2010, which “is a very, very strong new rewrite”. Linardos: “It’s being built from scratch with a few legacy components, which will be phased out over the course of 2.1 and 2.2. So it’ll probably be about 75% from scratch, and three or four months after that it will be 100%.”
Recently, Nokia launched the N900 phone, the first model running on Maemo, which is a Linux based operating system. Nokia plans to launch more phones with Maemo and right now the first applications are available in Maemo Select:
Maemo Select is a web based store that will combine Maemo applications from both the Ovi Store and the Maemo Community. Right now, 47 free applications are available, with wallpapers and themes coming soon.
Maemo applications will also become available in the Nokia Ovi Store. The device client for downloading and purchasing apps is also coming soon. Including Maemo, the Ovi Store would support four different platforms: Java, Symbian, Widgets and Maemo.
It is not clear why Nokia would distribute apps for Maemo in both Maemo Select and the Ovi Store. It could be that Maemo Select is an intermediary solution and that it will be replaced by the Ovi Store.
The Nokia Ovi Store has been live for four months. At its launch, 555 items were available in the store, of which 90% was paid.
To see how the available content is developing, we are tracking all items in the store. We made an overview of the number of available content items since its launch:
Nokia Ovi Store content
The store now has 3,239 items available, of which still the largest part paid. For all types of content, the proportion of free and paid items has been stable.
Applications are the fastest growing type of content in the store, with an increase of over 25% in the last month. Games are also showing growth over 20%. The other content types are growing slower, with the amount of Audio & Video items even decreasing.
We will keep tracking the content. Nokia Ovi Store will be added to our Distimo Report in the coming months, and we updated our mobile app store overview incorporating the numbers mentioned above.
With Nokia World around the corner (September 2 in Germany), a lot of news has come out in the last days. This week Nokia announced the launch of a netbook and now also presented their first mobile phone based on the Maemo platform. Nokia already offers an internet tablet based on Maemo, which is an Linux based operating system.
It is very interesting how all these new developments will influence Nokia’s app store strategy. Nokia now has its Ovi Store with content for Symbian phones, a netbook that is likely to run Windows and a new phone with the Linux based Maemo as operating system instead of Nokia’s long used Symbian.
The first signs on how this all affects Nokia’s app store offering are starting to appear. The first Nokia phone with Maemo will have something called Maemo Select, described as:
the place to discover the most popular downloads from the Maemo community and Ovi Store. Choose your favourite applications, themes, and wallpapers to personalise your Maemo device.
Maemo already has a community of developers that build and offer applications to consumers. On maemo.org close to 500 applications are available for the current Maemo platform. Looking at the Maemo Select description, Nokia will be offering this content combined with content from the Ovi Store on the new N900 phone.
It is unclear yet if, and exactly how, Maemo applications will be supported in the Ovi Store. Expect more news on this September 2nd.
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