Hacker News Reader

Comment by Geee | Hacker News Reader

Not really, Nokia's Ovi Store is now third in downloaded apps per day. However, in many countries such as in China, Ovi Store is the most popular app store.

http://www.forum.nokia.com/Distribute/Ovi_Store_statistics.x...

View on HN

Pretty much the only people making money on Ovi are game companies. Nothing wrong with that, except that gaming is different to other types of software.

Also, note these points:

  * There are 30,000 apps available
  * 400,000 new Forum Nokia developers were added in the last 12 months.

That really illustrates what a horrible platform Nokia has. 400K new developers were interested in it over the last 12 months, and yet there are only 30K apps in the whole store. Compare that to the adoption that the iOS and Android app stores have had.

The prior development tools for native Symbian have been horrid, combined with difficult signing process etc. However, the transition to Qt and Qt Quick -based apps makes it all very easy and convenient thus enabling the potential better. It's true that it isn't the most exciting platform right now, but it's certainly on the right path.

Yeah, but that's like saying that Lotus 123 was on the right path when they finally ported it to Windows.

With Qt/Qt Quick you get an environment that is sort of competitive with where iOS and Android were over a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS and Android have moved on and are accelerating development of their SDKs, and Nokia is falling further & further behind.

Anyway, say you build your app, thinking how great it will be with the huge reach of the Symbian platform. You ship, and discover that (a) people who have a Symbian phone and can afford to buy your apps are just waiting to upgrade to iOS or Android, and so won't invest any time in new apps on their Nokia phones and (b) Symbian is only growing in use in the developing world, where people are very unlikely to buy your app because the cost is a lot more significant.

So you give up, and go back to iOS and Android where the toolsets are nicer and there is more money to be made.

Hmm, in my opinion Qt/Qt Quick is certainly superior to Android in many respects today. And I do use both.

This says nothing of what the sales are like in China which is notorious for not paying for software. In China currently these phones have a much larger share of the market because they are cheaper than iphones and android phones.

Eventually when the prices of the better smartphones fall you would expect a big shift away from nokia unless they can improve on their current offerings. I think we will have to wait some time to for windows 7 phone to pick up some market share before app store figures show whether it is a better bet than nokia in the American market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com