It may not be particularly fancy, but Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is saying that it has made developing an application for Ovi as simple as performing seven simple steps.
Once created, the application will be live typically within 24 hours and be available in 180 countries. Nokia says it takes only a few minutes to build and uses tools, such as RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The Ovi App Wizard is not supposed to require any programming skills, and is free. Users can decide whether to charge for the app or not, and could go as far as to integrate advertising.
Similar tools are available like this for Android and iPhone, but typically they are not free. By Nokia providing the tools themselves, it will be one good way to increase the pure volume of applications in the Ovi store. In April, the Ovi Store was seeing more than 1.6 million downloads a day.
It’s good to see Nokia working to make it easier to create apps for Ovi. Indeed simple solutions are welcomed in today’s complex and fragmented mobile environment. However, it would be good to see Nokia put some energy behind the user experience on the Ovi store. My own experiences have left me underwhelmed by their processes and interaction.
See http://blog.bango.com/2010/04/29/nokia-ovi-disappoints/
Whats more, I’m in the UK on a popular (old) handset – N95 8Gb – and I’m still not offered an option for operator billing when I try to buy anything. Hence, I usually go to another mobile storefront where I can simply click to pay with no hassle.