Have Developers Given Up On Nokia’s Ovi Store?

Ovi Store

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has always touted the millions of phones it has in consumer hands — 68 million alone for smartphones –as one of the main reasons why developers would want to create applications for the Ovi Store. But it appears that developers just don’t care how big the Finnish phone maker’s base is.

Developer Jan Ole Suhr, creator of Gravity, a Twitter client for Nokia phones and one of the Ovi’s store most popular apps, told Bloomberg.com that developers are hesitant to invest the time and effort into Nokia smartphone apps “when nobody knows its future.” Suhr added, “The new shiny things aren’t available, and there’s only the old-fashioned stuff, where it takes a lot of work to make the software look good.” Suhr has a point.

The N8, Nokia’s first device running on the upgraded Symbian 3 OS, which promises to deliver a better user experience and a slicker look and feel, has been delayed and won’t be released until Q3. Moreover, it’s not just the iPhone and Android that Nokia is losing out to.

Some analysts believe that the Ovi Store, and especially in the U.S., is the least attractive of six main outlets for developers, behind RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), Palm (NSDQ: PALM) and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) as well as Android and the iPhone. Gartner analyst Nick Jones warned that it could take until Symbian 4 to get a “really compelling Symbian device.” In which case, he notes that its ecosystem might not reach its full potential until 2011.

How serious an issue is this? Despite having a 41 percent share of the smartphone market, Nokia’s inability to convince the market about its ability appeal to developers has pushed its shares down sharply. Since the July 2008 opening of Apple’s App Store, Nokia shares have fallen 51 percent.

Its market value in 1999, when it was seen as the undisputed leader in mobile phones, was 203 billion euros. It now stands around 29 billion. But is 2011 too late for Nokia? Some developers say 2010 is already too late. Evernote CEO Phil Libin, whose company creates note-taking apps for phones, told Bloomberg that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) had already “leapfrogged Nokia in terms of developer friendliness in the past two years. There’s no comparison.”

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post