Nokia Touts Ovi Store Growth

It was just two months ago that Nokia announced downloads from the Ovi Store had breached the 2-million-per-day mark. The rate of downloads has shot up dramatically in the last eight weeks, pushing the daily download number to more than 3 million. Between now and New Year's, Nokia will push out some 132 million applications (assuming the rate doesn't continue to climb).

Where did this growth spurt come from? Nokia assigns credit to the availability of its first Symbian^3 handset, the N8. Since the N8's debut, Nokia has also brought the C7 and C6-01 S^3 handsets to market. The N8, in particular, is off to a good start, and the excitement about that handset's capabilities -- both with developers and consumers -- has helped push the number apps sold up and up and up.

"Ovi Store is on a strong trajectory fueled by new apps and games from a growing number of partners and more than 250,000 new consumers signing up for Ovi every day," said Tero Ojanpero, Executive Vice President, Services, Nokia.

"The number of daily downloads has increased from about 2 million to 3 million since September. We anticipate our progress will continue as we have just begun shipping our new Symbian smartphones."

It doesn't hurt that Stephen Elop, Nokia's new CEO, got on stage during Nokia World in September and handed a $1 million check to a developer. According to Nokia, its renewed commitment to Symbian and the Qt developer tools have had a positive impact with developers. Nokia said that the Nokia Qt software development toolkit (SDK) has been downloaded 1.5 million times by developers.

Further, Nokia has signed up 400,000 new developers in the past 12 months alone, with 92 developers each topping the 1 million download mark. That's all encouraging further interest from the developer community.

"The rapid growth on Ovi Store to pass the 1 billion annualized downloads mark demonstrates that Nokia is a competitor in both scale and size when it comes to its services," said Scott Ellison, Vice President of Mobile and Consumer Connected Platforms at IDC. "With Nokia's stronger focus on the Qt platform and improved developer ecosystem, Nokia should continue to see its developer numbers increase as developers see profit from new revenue shares, operator billings and the ever-growing user base around the world."