There was a flurry of activity yesterday at Nokia with them announcing their brand new phones – the X7 and the E6. It was also a big day for Symbian with Nokia coming up with the latest version of the OS codenamed the “Anna”. Apart from all these, there was another significant announcement that was made.
Nokia’s apps and downloads market, the Ovi Store according to Nokia, now sees a staggering 5 million downloads a day. This is 2 million up from the figures that were released back in November 2010. This in spite of Symbian being rapidly trounced by Android in terms of the number of handsets shipped. The number of apps is increasing by almost 1000 per week and currently there are roughly 40,000 apps available for download.
It was recently that the Ovi Store started offering content in India in the local currency as well. The initial agreement was with Reliance and would soon arrive on other operators as well.
It remains to be seen whether the Ovi Store continues to grow further. This is because Nokia has clarified that it would be moving over to Windows Phone 7 as their primary smartphone OS starting this very year and once that happens, it would be all about the Windows Phone Marketplace. But then with over 200 million Symbian smartphones out there, the Ovi Store is far from being dead. The story might be different – say two years down the line though.
