If reports from the blogosphere are to be believed, Nokia is about to enter the application store marketplace, as it seeks to replicate the success rivals such as Apple and RIM have had in getting new mobile handset applications to market and on devices in record time and in huge numbers.
The Finnish vendor has yet to confirm or deny that an announcement is planned for the Mobile World Congress shindig in Barcelona next week. However, as Nokia has already revealed its intentions to become a major mobile Internet services powerhouse within the next two to three years (see today’s announcement regarding the purchase of Germany-based bit-side, part of this mobile Internet services strategy), it makes good sense to offer a clear path for developers to get their applications directly to their audiences.
Nokia’s previous efforts in this regard may be said to have lacked focus and were difficult to find and use. It says much about the transparent business model employed by Apple for its much-lauded App Store that the market leader in handset sales has decided to adopt a similar approach. Presently, few details are known about the new service, other than that “the distribution and revenue sharing model between app makers and Nokia looks very attractive”, runs the blog by Russia-based Eldar Murtazin.
The new service will offer programs based on the Symbian OS used in many of Nokia’s latest generation smartphones. Nokia claims to have sold almost 61 million smartphones in 2008 (or nearly 38% of all 161 million smartphones it believes were sold by all players that year). So the service has the potential to reach a huge, growing audience. By comparison, it’s reported that Apple has already passed the 500 million downloads mark less than nine months after its App Store was launched.
With Samsung and RIM having launched applications stores only recently, it seems that the road to the potentially lucrative mobile applications market (the App-ian Way?) is about to become one very busy thoroughfare indeed.
Tags: App Store, Apple, applications, BlackBerry, business model, content, iPhone, mobile, mobile device, mobile handset, mobile internet, mobile phone, Mobile World Congress, Nokia, Research In Motion, RIM, Samsung, smartphone, store
