Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has always touted the millions of phones it has in consumer hands — 68 million alone for smartphones –as one of the main reasons why developers would want to create applications for the Ovi Store. But it appears that developers just don’t care how big the Finnish phone maker’s base is.
Developer Jan Ole Suhr, creator of Gravity, a Twitter client for Nokia phones and one of the Ovi’s store most popular apps, told Bloomberg.com that developers are hesitant to invest the time and effort into Nokia smartphone apps “when nobody knows its future.” Suhr added, “The new shiny things aren’t available, and there’s only the old-fashioned stuff, where it takes a lot of work to make the software look good.” Suhr has a point.
The N8, Nokia’s first device running on the upgraded Symbian 3 OS, which promises to deliver a better user experience and a slicker look and feel, has been delayed and won’t be released until Q3. Moreover, it’s not just the iPhone and Android that Nokia is losing out to.
Some analysts believe that the Ovi Store, and especially in the U.S., is the least attractive of six main outlets for developers, behind RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), Palm (NSDQ: PALM) and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) as well as Android and the iPhone. Gartner analyst Nick Jones warned that it could take until Symbian 4 to get a “really compelling Symbian device.” In which case, he notes that its ecosystem might not reach its full potential until 2011.
How serious an issue is this? Despite having a 41 percent share of the smartphone market, Nokia’s inability to convince the market about its ability appeal to developers has pushed its shares down sharply. Since the July 2008 opening of Apple’s App Store, Nokia shares have fallen 51 percent.
Its market value in 1999, when it was seen as the undisputed leader in mobile phones, was 203 billion euros. It now stands around 29 billion. But is 2011 too late for Nokia? Some developers say 2010 is already too late. Evernote CEO Phil Libin, whose company creates note-taking apps for phones, told Bloomberg that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) had already “leapfrogged Nokia in terms of developer friendliness in the past two years. There’s no comparison.”
QT may save the day. Nokia bought Trolltech in 2008 because it knew it was weak in the software development area. Having used QT as well as many of the other SDKs I can say that it is just as good as the others and QML is looking really great. Nokia has done well to support open source in Meego, Symbian and QT and the fruits of this are starting to pay off. Lots of OEMs were showing tablets running Meego at Computex and since developing for Meego means using QT I don’t think the writing is on the wall for Nokia just yet.
Yep, with Qt Nokia will have the best SDK. And also it can take advantage of the large open source codebase coming from linux desktop.
Also the fact that Meego will also run on tablets, netbooks and a bunch of other devices will make it attractive to devellopers : you code your application in Qt, then you can deploy it across the whole range of devices.
Symbian and MeeGo platfom are not ready yet. I agree Nokia is late to the party. But they come with attractive argument.
why bother, Nokia’s smartphone market continues to diminish
they arent shipping any interesting devices until Q4
their main market penetrations are the third world, and only SMS is big there, not Apps
iOS and Android markets are growing rapidly
as a developer I wont be wasting my time on a losing platform
it ‘s used to be my favorite brand but now i kindda forgot that it is exist …but still hope for a big come back in the future…:)
it is a good brand..i still use it but still want them to come up with new style and tech that can stay in the market..
The attractivness for a developer of an AppStore is first and foremost, its ability to generate income!! Yes, they see millions of downoads per day on Ovi, but how much income? The market tells us the answer: far, far less than the other AppStores and this in spite of theoretical huge base of smartphones. Theoretical because personally I don’t call a N95 a smartphone… (but Nokia does) for example.
Nokia phones are geek phones, while Apple, Android, etc OS based phones are mass market entertainment products. See the difference?
I doubt QT is the savior. Like everything Nokia it will take 10x longer to release, work 5x worse than expected, and ultimately not make a dent as the company continues its downward slide. The numbers with Nokia are deceiving. Yes they claim healthy downloads – but the lionshare of that is OviMaps and 4-5 other prime titles. Yes they have a big worldwide share of the smartphone market, but that share is distributed all across the world, so if you want to take advantage you will have to localize to a dozen languages. Nokia needs to re-org in a big way – and not the deck chair shuffling they have been doing, but a real, clean out your closets, purge. As long as they function like the massive, matrixed, unwieldy company incapable of making even the simplest decision without involving 16 committees and half the company, they will fail against more nimble competition.
I can easily tell you why developers do not care about OVI anymore – i am an app maker myself and i had to do with Nokia for quite some time now – its because also Nokia does not care about the developers. If i publish an app on OVI store and a user posts a unqualified, absolutely wrong comment about the app, there is no way to discuss removal of posts – which really could destroy app reputation really quickly. Also, there is a problem that app comments get lost constantly (all the comments for an app are gone from one day to another) – no way to get it back. If you drop them an email they say “it will be fixed in the future”. Oh there is sooo much arguments why Nokia & OVI sucks, i think this small box of text will not be sufficient to tell you. RIP Nokia & OVI!
I think also that Nokia one of the worst companies i ever worked with.I am a Qt developer and i am developing applications for OVI store but they take a long time to respond to you.
and i think that there support team is not really qualified they gave me wrong information.I thinking to immigrate to another system like android or even iphone.