Nokia provides app developers with new tools for Ovi

Nokia's Liz Schmiel promises a new Ovi store refresh soon

There’s been some interesting news from Nokia World 2010 over Ovi that should make app developers very happy.

The first bit of good news is the usage statistics for its Ovi Store. Liz Schimel, VP of music services & connected entertainment, stated that Ovi Store now has 130 million active users globally, with 2 million downloads each day; 70% of those 2 million are applications – we’re guessing the rest is made up of music, ringtones, photos and files.

A new Ovi Store?

Schimel also promised a major refresh of the Ovi Store soon. “We’re bringing a whole universe of apps, music, content together in Ovi World. A much more integrated user interface where consumers can move across a vast array of content from a huge number of partners. It’s going to be super, super content rich. Content is the hero, consumer access is the holy grail.” Concluding, Schimel summed up the developments as “an enhanced Ovi Store experience, with improved search and navigation, and discovery.”

New developer tools

The second piece of good news is Nokia are launching a number of developer tools with the goal of making it simpler and more lucrative for people to build applications for its Ovi and Symbian platforms.

Enhancements to the Nokia Qt Software Development Kit (SDK), are said to result in a 70 percent reduction in the number of lines of code required when developing for Symbian devices. Additionally, Nokia also announced an SDK for Series 40 Touch and Type.

Ovi revenue share

Nokia has also made changes to the Ovi Store user experience to make it faster and making applications easier to find , plus developers can now take advantage of in-application purchase, and has enabled a wide range of application pricing options in Ovi Store such as subscription models, micro-transactions or try-and-buy. Additionally there’s an improved revenue share, in the case of carrier billing, developers will get 60 percent, while carriers will get 40 percent.

Orange and Ovi

But just as everything was becoming clear in terms of the app strategy for Nokia, they then decided to completely muddy the waters by announcing a partnership with Orange. Under the partnership Orange’s users in the UK and France that will see content and apps from Ovi and the Orange Application Shop merged in an effort to create what they describe as “one easy and seamless experience.” Here at Bmob we’re not sure how this is exactly going to make things easy or seamless, to us it just seems like another opportunity to screw up the Ovi brand by confusing the public, is Ovi from Nokia or Orange.

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