Ovi Store Enjoys Growing Downloads

Nokia's software solutions portal, the Ovi Store, is starting to be more and more popular among mobile phone users, it seems. The application store had a slow start, influenced greatly by the fact that it wasn't enjoying wide carrier support around the world, yet it seems that things are starting to move upwards. For what it's worth, the growth is fueled by the availability of a wider range of software solutions than before, and by support for more handsets than in the beginning, but the availability of highly appealing mobile applications in Ovi Store is another beneficial factor.

Only a few days ago, Nimbuzz, the popular VoIP and social network app, managed to register its one millionth download from the Ovi Store, something that says a lot about the application's usage on Nokia phones. Moreover, it seems that users are also attracted by the games included in the Ovi Store, and Polarbit has registered more than one million downloads of its games available in the portal already. Not to mention that one of the latest additions to the storefront, the Ovi Maps Racing game from Nokia, is reportedly registering hundreds of thousands of downloads.

“We are delighted with the success we have seen from Ovi Store by Nokia, which helps us reach 40% of the global handset market in more than 180 countries. It is a great reward for the efforts we have made to offer our mass market application on both Nokia smart phones and feature phones. Making Nimbuzz available to the global Ovi Store audience has paid off tremendously,” said Evert-Jaap Lugt, founder & CEO of Nimbuzz, according to Nokia Conversations.

The Ovi Store is indeed enjoying fast development, as well as a great deal of new applications and content being added to it constantly. Nokia also announced that it plans on revamping the application store to offer an enhanced experience to its users, and that should help it increase the user base for the application store. The increasing number of entertainment solutions available via the portal should also be a growth driver, that's for sure.

“We take great pride in being early adopters, as well as in our ability to deliver a consistent, high quality gaming experience across all platforms. We are greatly aided in this ambition by our Fuse middleware platform which has allowed us to utilize the full potential of the Nokia Game API plug-in to quickly bring Raging Thunder, Armageddon Squadron, WaveBlazer, Iron Sight and ToonWarz to the Ovi Store,” Anders Nilsson, founder and CTO of Polarbit, said.