"Ovi Store will tower over Apple's App Store and Android Market in a few years". Poll: Do you agree?

@MickyFin retweeted a very provocative tweet by @tomiahonen

Tomi comment 4 Ovi – in a few years Ovi will tower over all other App stores incl iPhone & Android simply due to Nokia’s scale. Inevitable 8 minutes ago via web

At the current state of super fragmented Ovi Store where compatibility and content is low, despite much of the improvements, it doesn’t seem at all possible that Ovi Store could ever topple the mighty App Store or even been the rapidly growing Android Market.

I thought 4, was for as in comment for Ovi, but it turns out that tweet is part of 6 tweets, explaining the logic behind it. Tomi is a prolific mobile communications author and analyst and has published many books, one of which, “Communities Dominates Brands” has a counterpart blog communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/

How will Nokia Conquer App Market with Ovi? According to Tomi:

Tomi comment 1 Ovi – first, as the various platforms sort their App stores out, they fix the bugs and kinks, get reasonably similar..

Tomi comment 2 Ovi – then as Nokia sells 450M phones/year & world replace phones every 17 months, has time to roll out Ovi to its clients

Tomi comment 3 Ovi – as developers see Ovi is world’s furthest-reaching app platform (outside of USA obviously) they rush to port apps to it

Tomi comment 4 Ovi – in a few years Ovi will tower over all other App stores incl iPhone & Android simply due to Nokia’s scale. Inevitable

Tomi comment 5 Ovi – look at Nokia’s ethos, they learned that ‘internet lesson’ very well, to launch often and release updates often..

Tomi comment 6 Ovi – Nokia know for market success, ‘best’ is the enemy of ‘good enough’

MeeGo is already getting much support from huge companies such as Cisco, Asus, Acer, BMW and many, many, many more. Symbian is still the most popular smartphone OS, with 40% Global market share (46%  to iPhone’s 15%, Android’s 4% – 2009) and has new revisions Symbian^3 and Symbian^4 coming this year. Both can run Cross platform applications which run on Qt – meaning apps made for MeeGo also run on Symbian. There’s your compatibility/fragmentation sorted.

Though it does raise a question whether all MeeGo apps will be through Ovi, which will help Ovi Store a lot in having one domain for all other devices, even non Nokias, to get their content.

Do you think Ovi Store can outgun Apple’s App Store? Jobs is proudly citing of his 185,000 apps and growing every day. His iPad has stirred much excitement again for his platform. What about Android Market? Android phones are being shoved in our faces left and right as everyone and their grandmother seems to be producing Android phones.

I’d like to see Nokia execute Ovi Store to how it should have been to begin with – the App Store “killer”. Eventually, (hopefully) Nokia’s higher end phones can start to trickle in to the market which can actually run decent looking applications that’s of current standard or better than competitors.

So the poll. The time concept of “a few years” is probably when both MeeGo and Symbian platforms have become mature “next gen” smartphone operating systems, not ‘fledgeling’ ones like S^3 or Maemo , i.e. maybe well into Symbian^4 or (real) MeeGo 1.0

[polldaddy poll=3049262]

Tags: Nokia, Ovi Store

Category: Nokia