I’m talking about you Ovi, Nokia’s new app Store.
Early criticisms point out the store’s paltry selection, slow performance and sign-in errors, disappearing apps and a less-than-intuitive UI. Nokia blamed the store’s unresponsiveness on unusually high traffic and did its best to address the problem, but even those efforts by its own admission resulted in only “intermittent performance improvements.”
[Ovi, Nokias New App Store, Off to Rocky Start | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD]
That reminded me of a nice post from 37signals. Nokia, like Blackberry and Microsoft obviously copied Apple’s App. Store and that’s a problem. When copying you skip understanding, and understanding is how you make progress. When you copy, you don’t understand how or why something is how it is. Instead, you simply “repurpose the last layer instead of understanding all the layers underneath.”
My other big gripe is content, the lack of quality content deters me from ever entering Ovi. Who was given the SDK to develop new apps for Ovi? Here’s a list of the top most downloaded Apps in the App Store from July 10th, 2008 (when the store just opened) compared to the Ovi store.
| Apple App Store | Nokia Ovi Store |
| 1. Remote | 1. Star Trek Ring Tone |
| 2. AIM | 2. WorldMate 2009 |
| 3. Facebook | 3. RaceChrono |
| 4. Google Mobile | 4. SMS Preview |
| 5. eBay Mobile | 5. Flashlight |
| 6. Twitterific | 6. AP News |
| 7. NYTimes | 7. Star Trek Wallpaper |
| 8. MySpace Mobile | 8. Alphabet Wordsearch |
| 9. AOL Radio | 9. The Journey |
| 10. Pandora Radio | 10. Buddycloud |
Top iPhone Apps from July 10, 2008 Source:TechCrunch
Honestly, if a Star Trek ringtone is the best thing your store has to offer, I won’t be coming in any time soon. On top of all that, the store is hard to navigate, difficult to log into, and slow. Nokia, do you actually expect anyone to go there? Give me Pandora, a good Twitter app, and make it easy to work with, then I’ll swing by.
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Comments ( 2 )
Thanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting
JamesD added these pithy words on
Jun 11 09 at
12:30 pm
They fail because they’re just trying to cash in, rather than offer their customer base something good. AT&T is working on a couple “app stores” that are complete jokes as well. Suits don’t understand the real reason why Apple succeeded.
Stephen M. Walker II added these pithy words on
Jul 28 09 at
3:52 pm
