GLOBAL – As well as new devices and operating system news, we also have the latest update from Ovi Store today. The Store now serves up to five million downloads a day, with 158 developers from 41 countries having passed the one million downloads milestone.
The size of the Store has grown by nearly eight times in one year, with more than 40,000 apps now available. About 1000 new apps are added every week.
The attraction to developers is driven by Nokia’s huge user base of smartphone users (around 200 million) and operator billing for apps. Operator billing has been shown to increase the likelihood of purchases by up to four times. Nokia leads the field in this: there’s integrated operator billing with 112 operators in 36 markets – that’s 25 times more than our nearest competitor. New revenue opportunities for in-app billing and in-app advertising are in Beta.
These opportunities are also being extended to Series 40 devices, which will enable apps for the next billion mobile phone users. The rollout of the latest Ovi Store on S40 has resulted in more than 35 per cent growth in downloads in the last two months, making up about a quarter of the total.
Our favourite catapult users approve. “Nokia’s Ovi Store has given our Angry Birds a fighting chance to defeat those havoc-wrecking green pigs and share the joys of clearing levels from every corner of the globe,” said Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio. “We look forward to continuing development for Nokia’s latest Symbian devices and working with Nokia and the future of the Windows Phone platform.”
“In about a year, Nokia’s Ovi Store has gone from approximately one million downloads per day to up to five million downloads per day today, and the velocity appears to be increasing, fueled largely by Series 40 and new Symbian devices,” said Josh Martin, senior analyst, Strategy Analytics. “At this new rate, that’s nearly 2 billion annualized downloads and with the company’s new direction, app developers can surely capitalize on this growth today and in the future with the estimated approximately 150 million Symbian devices that Nokia expects to deliver.”
We’re delighted with Ovi Store’s success. Let us know what you think in the comments.