LONDON, England – The Nokia World event co-hosts the Developer Summit, and the company has today announced a string of improvements to the developer offering. Purmina Kochichar – who’s the VP for Forum Nokia told developers: ““We have made it much simpler, removed obstacles and made it more lucrative for people to build apps for our phones. We believe that this will convince more developers to build apps for the millions of people, in more than 190 countries, that are using the Ovi Store on their Nokia devices.”  Read on for the specifics.

First of all, Nokia announced improvements to the Nokia Qt Software Development Kit (SDK) which have resulted in a 70 per cent reduction in the number of lines of code needed to create apps for Symbian smartphones, a user-base of around 175 million phones across 190 countries.

In addition to these improvements, the Qt SDK has been extended to cover Series 40 Touch and Type phones. The SDK is available for download at forum.nokia.com and will make development for these devices simpler, including porting existing apps created for other Nokia smartphones.

Nokia also plans to make it easier and more profitable for developers to sell their apps through the Ovi Store. Nokia has removed the time-consuming step of app-signing. Ovi Store users have an active presence in more than 190 countries and form the largest operator billing population available. As part of its ongoing evolution, the Ovi Store has received a refresh for the arrival of Symbian^3 smartphones. The new interface is slicker and more responsive than previously, allowing for easier discovery and finding the apps for which you’re looking.

The Ovi Store currently generates over two million downloads a day, with an average of 2.6 apps being downloaded on each visit. Around 90% of the daily traffic to Ovi Store converts to downloads.

Anything that’s good news for developers is good news for all Nokia users of course. We look forward to trying out the fruits of these new developments.

Join Nokia VP of Media, George Linardos below talking about the new Ovi Store: