Our sister site MobileCrunch may be convinced that not every company needs an app store, but for Nokia to launch a central platform for distribution and sales of micro-programs developed for the Symbian OS, it would make a whole lotta sense.
Update (13 February): a couple of days later, Reuters confirms the news, citing two industry sources who say there will be a press conference on Monday morning.
And if what Eldar Murtazin, editor of Mobile-review.com (both blogs are in Russian) writes is true, then that’s exactly what the Finnish juggernaut in mobile is going to launch at the upcoming Mobile World Congress. I concur with Engadget who says launching an application portal/store is a logical step to take for any mobile handset maker these days, but if Nokia is in fact going to launch one it will be worth taking a look at, and not only from a consumer or developer standpoint.
According to UnwiredView, this is what Murtazin wrote in Russian:
At first glance, for now, the app portal looks so so, there is some confusion. But they are trying, polishing it and a lot has changed for the better in a matter of days. A right step in a right direction… And the distribution and revenue sharing model between app makers and Nokia looks very attractive.
At this point, this is nothing but a rumor, but such a move would definitely make sense and Muzartin is known to have strong insider connections in the mobile industry so this isn’t just a random thought from a blogger.
It’s worth noting in this context that Nokia now fully owns Symbian Limited, but contributes the mobile operating system and S60 software to the Symbian Foundation, which is readying its official launch with a slew of members from the industry, including Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, Sharp and dozens more. There’s also an active community site for Symbian developers already in place, so they wouldn’t be creating an ecosystem from scratch.
Then again, as someone pointed out in the comments of the Engadget post, Nokia already has a couple of half-baked portals for mobile software, e.g. Mosh, Download! and Software Market, so it’s unclear what would happen to those or how they would be able to morph these sites as well as the N-Gage platform for games into one single application store.
We’ll find out more about Nokia’s plans at the Mobile Word Congress, which is being held from 16 to 19 February in Barcelona.
If Nokia can pull this off and get some quality into this process instead of getting it out there just for the heck of it, I would be really interested.
One thing is for sure, if companies keep starting up their own app stores, developers are going to be busier than usual.
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What’s stopping Nokia from putting a customized version of Android on their phones, then leveraging the Google App store?
Idiots. I used to be a Nokia customer. Now I use HTC.
Get with the program Nokia.
They now own the most successful mobile OS out there – why should they throw that overboard and fork Android to replace Google stuff with their own service offerings? Makes little sense to me, especially now that Samsung is ready to support Symbian in full force.
well same here but i must say nokia software is just so much better , winmo is slow anyway you try to hide ( with something like touch flo) you still come out short or should i say slow
Making a store is meaningful. Making a store where is dead simple to buy, like the apple store, is even more. But I cannot see this simplicity in the current Symbian phones. Will the store bring changes to Symbian too?
App Store is a great idea {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/rriWMdFvhG_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”App Store is a great idea ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/Fpe7y1JstQ”}}}
It seems to me that Nokia still has no clue of what an app store makes interesting to developers. It’s not the app store itself. If you have a look at nokias portfolio in terms of devices and different software platforms it’s really hard to decide which platform a developer is going to support.
They have all these different Java platforms, Symbian platforms and a horrible software update strategy. Devices are extremely different performancewise and when hitting the market these are extremely buggy. That’s being said, what should a developer do with one more Nokia app store?
Having done J2ME development in the past I’m happy to see Google and Apple as competitors in the mobile market. I hope Nokia will finally rethink its whole strategy and not just copying some ideas of their competitors.
All I have to say is this
http://code.goo...e/packages.html
Unless Nokia has a service class to run background processes, and has IDL, they can forget it.
Nokia has been notoriously weak at high level system software. They are good at MCU firmware. There’s no way they can compete with Android.
I’m tempted to ask if they implemented Dalvik, but I don’t dare to.
This is another Vic20 in the world of PCDOS and Apple II, circa 2009. I honestly can’t see myself investing time in this. Eventually they will have to bow to Google and install Android on their phones so why humor them?
http://www.foru..._and_SDKs.xhtml
For those interested. This is a mess compared to Google’s. I saw QT mentioned for maemo that they dumped on the 770 and 800 mini tablet. Ick.
Simplicity matters. IE no way.
Qt will be coming for both Maemo (fully integrated by the end of the year I guess – or whenever the Harmattan release will become available) and Symbian (April-ish afaik).
800 in the last reply should be “800 series”
I can confirm that news
Nokia’s very own app store, would not only be a good thing for Nokia, but it could be a very positive thing for Symbian OS (and Java ME).
ceo
Interesting that even Samsung announced its app store recently. Apple has definitely paved the way for mobile apps but just because Nokia builds it, will they come?
Nokia should have good success with its app store since it is the largest handset provider and should have a captive audience for its app store. The more important question is how long before the carriers intervene. Carriers have had these stores for a while now with limited success and they will not be happy with traffic and revenue from their customers being driven to the handset makers’ app stores.
Has AT&T shut down the iPhone store, has T-Mobile shut down the Google mobile market?
In order for mobile providers to do what you are suggesting, they would have to completely shut off internet access.
Fear of X phone company having the newest Mobile OS (Android) that everybody wants is enough to get them to give up that revenue.
In places like Canada where Rogers AT&T and the Canadian government are one and the same entity, where there are true monopolies and the people tax money is funding the telecom companies
http://www.thom...le-data-access/
In those places, you can leave consumers in the dark ages for years at a time. The Canadian public didn’t get the iPhone until years after Americans did. They still don’t have Android enabled phones.
In America at least, what you are suggesting could never happen.
I think most carriers are happy when people start using data more, which many 3rd party applications facilitate. And since operators can’t run proper app stores for all of the half-dozen or so software platforms used on their network, why not let the manufacturers take care of that?
Unlimited Internet data on 3G for my G1 on T-Mobile is $24.95 a month. That includes 400 SMS, but Google let’s you SMS for free now anyway with GTalk.
So if the Canadian or some other government, where socialism exists and fixing occurs and nobody really cares or can do anything about it, wants to open the doors to cheap data plans, it would cause them to lose the next election.
Those people are pretty poor compared to Americans, and they are solicited by offers such as this one:
cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/09/04/harper-cadman.html
If they want to keep their jobs, they have to keep “subsidizing” the Canadian telecom industry, but only those that pay them. Because the telecom industry made “big investments” and they took “massive price cuts” in order to get customers.
Again, this doesn’t pass in America. So low flat rate data plans will continue to rule here.
I suppose they could want people on their mobiles more to charge them for off plan calls. That may be the strategy, but definitely not for additional data as the plans are fixed for unlimited internet use.
I think the carriers must be going, “About time!”
i really appreciate it.i expected it a long back but am happy now.
Hey Mike, when is TechCrunch going to open up it’s own App Store? lol
I think it’s a smart move on Nokias part, it only makes sense. However, if it is not dead simple to use it will be difficult to download/use on cell phones (assuming that not everyone in the world has a top of the line handset).
I think it’s only a matter of time where a start up pops up that submits your application to ALL of the application stores for a fee.
Funny you should mention that. There is a company working on a VM that let’s you build and deploy visual basic style applications to multiple platforms at once through it’s application such as Adobe flash lets you run movies.
It will be the Macromedia of 2010 for Android, the iPhone and other platforms.
Just because all of the resources of Active X are not present on Android, iPhone ect… doesn’t mean you can’t make a container for simple applications.
You can even abstract threading on Android.
This is a whole new opportunity for plenty of smaller companies to become the Macromedia of today. LOLZ.
It’s too late but if anybody wants to throw a 8+ digits at a team, let me know. Any new team to make a UI container for iPhone, Android, and Symbian along with an IDE for graphics people would already be about year behind. If you threw a lot of cash at it, you could probably catch up.
Taking this a step further, Borland, who incidentally is on the Nokia tools page:
forum.nokia.com/Resources_and_Information/Tools/All_Tools_and_SDKs.xhtml
is only worth 45 million dollars now
http://finance..../finance?q=BORL
Mkt Cap: 45.88M
If you were going to make your own new VM for mobile platforms to compete with the one coming out later this year, you could simply buy out Borland and make them do it in Texas and use the Borland IDE for the container Movie editor. That’s totally mastermind of me for coming up with that. I should be an exec again.
As I suggested, Nokia should be purchasing Pocketgear.
http://www.kiwi...rg/archives/443
Why? I see no valid business reason other then ‘hey they have tons of downloads’.
Pretty much all of the developers have migrated to iPhone.
Folks, iPhone has already WON!
If the Nokia’s AppStore implementation is good, I don’t see a reason why you shouldn’t support it. Nokia sells 4 times as many smartphones as Apple (well, at least in the last quarter they did) – why would anybody with commercial interests ignore such a huge and somewhat untapped market?
I expected Nokia to open up long ago, but it never happened and i was waiting a long time for that. I make iphone apps now and it will take some convincing to change, but I hope they can convince me because i like their phones. Otherwise i think they will become the next Microsoft…
As you all say, it’s not a smart move, Nokia is just following Apple and Google, without a clear understanding.
I’ve been in the mobile business industry for 5 years, started in 2001 with the first app store on the market for mobiles (the company was IN-FUSIO and the technology called ExEn).
We sold the service to mobile operators and the embedded technology to manufacturer, at the time (before Java standards) there was no service like us.
Nokia like other manufacturer was an arrogant company. Despite the fact that the future of mobile was pretty clear for us (e.g., downloadable apps, 3d acceleration, full Internet acces), Nokia was only interested in slowing down the market, forming an alliance with operators and selling crappy phone.
They had about 6 or 7 years to do what Apple did but like others they preferred to be in their closed garden.
Now it’s too late, with Apple and Android on the market, they have a hard time to catch up.
Why? Because these companies are not multimedia companies but telcos, they’re not really shaped to design products with a great consumer experience.
Putting so many kind of phones of the market prove how unsure their are about their market.
You should know that Murtazin is not a credible expert. He makes his forecasts without any insider information and has been caught manufacturing facts several times. If you read Russian here is a good post abut his methods by Art Lebedev: http://tema.liv...com/191519.html
The App store for Nokia might be a good idea and might even be in the works but you should not base your analysis on Murtzin’s comments.
I’m a little confused by all of this app store hype. What’s the big deal?
The only thing I can think of is that I am based in Asia and you’re all in the US.
Could it be that you are confusing the absurd restrictions US carriers put on the phones they sell with what you can do with an unfettered phone? Because in other parts of the world you’ve been able to download and install apps for Nokia phones for years.
Nokia already has an “app store”, it’s called Download. http://download.nokia.com/
Its also supplied with every recent S60 device.
I’m not saying that it’s as good as App Store, though
Crippled with different devices and operators.
Nokia doesn’t learn a lesson. They will fail when they don’t leave that path. They should first make their OS and devices better before starting an app store. I wonder what sites like Handango.com think about that step. Also a lot of carriers where Nokia has long term contracts about software delivery could get into trouble when people visit the Nokia App Store instead the carriers App Store (ex: games).
Nokia sells twice as much phones as Samsung. They both dominate the retail stores. Chances are they will succeed.
Microsoft never has been the first to adopt in software/Internet, still they always became #1. The same could apply for Nokia and Samsung as they control the retail market.
Nokia will launch an app store, its obvious. As far as execution, we will see. With Nokia’s current global marketshare for handsets being the largest by a wide margin, its obviously attractive. Note, the majority of marketshare is in Asia and EU, not US, where it is less than 10%. As for the carriers, see prior sentence. NOK has never had a great relationship with the carriers in the US, yes, its getting better, and has been quoted by their execs that the US market will be a major focus. I personally do not know how well they will execute however in the US. EU and Asia, I am confident in.
The recent move towards services, along with the now rumors of an app store, all move this company towards a services business, with a solid handset distribution, and of course, from monetization perspective, some subscription, but also dont forget Nokia Interactive, the ad business group within the Services unit.
Full Disclosure- I am former employee of Nokia-
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But couldn’t this hinder the Symbian Foundation by increasing the perception that it’s still going to be closely tied to Nokia? I think it makes more sense for the Symbian Foundation to launch an app store independent of Nokia, as I thought the goal of open-sourcing it was to get more handset developers to pick up the OS.
it is a good idea ofr nokia lauch app store. it will integrate all its applications for the nokia users. and compete with BB and iphone.