Nokia's Ovi store grows to five million downloads a day

Nokia has announced that its Ovi Store has grown by a factor of eight over the past year to feature over 40,000 applications, and registers five million dowloads a day.

The company said that the latest handsets using the outgoing Symbian mobile operating system – the Nokia N8, Nokia C6-01, Nokia C7 and Nokia E7 – account for 15 per cent of the store's daily downloads.

Nokia was keen to talk up the increased success of developers targeting the Symbian-based app store, saying that 158 had passed the one million download mark.

By comparison, Apple, which runs the biggest mobile application store, said earlier this year that the App Store had registered its 10 billionth download.

Google's Android Marketplace managed to double its app tally within six months last year, announcing that it had 100,000 apps for download in October.

Android recently received a major boost from Amazon, which opened its own Android Appstore to sell applications and provide developers with an additional shop window and revenue opportunity.

Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at Quocirca, suggested that it is in Nokia's best interests to promote the Ovi Store in preparation for the transition to Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform.

"I see this as a 'late life kicker'. The thing that's interesting about what Nokia has said is that it's more about the app store than Symbian. If I were Nokia I'd promote all the things, like the app store, that hold its ecosystem together," he told V3.co.uk.

Bamforth likened Nokia's task of unpicking its Symbian platform from its smartphone ecosystem as "ripping a tablecloth off the table without disturbing any of the crockery".

In this sense, the analyst suggested, Nokia's Ovi announcement is "just polishing the table before it attempts the rip".

Nokia was also keen to talk up new monetisation opportunities for developers, which it said are tailored for local markets and come with integrated billing to 112 operators in 36 markets. This is 25 times more operator billing integrations than its nearest competitor, Nokia claimed.

"Nokia needs some solidity around its ecosystem to keep the independent software vendors and developers on-side. If they start to lose developers and volume, they really are hosed," Bamforth said.

The analyst also believes that Symbian will be around for longer in those markets that Microsoft does not see as key.

"Nokia is looking at sustaining the long slow decline of Symbian in these markets," he said.