Nokia is increasing opportunities for developers by lowering the barriers of entry to publish applications and content to Ovi Store. This includes improvements in developer tools, reducing investment costs for Qt and Symbian developers, providing new user experience services, and sharing updated Ovi Store statistics to help in effective decision making, which the company showcased at GITEX Mobile Apps and Content World.
Hatem Nawar, Forum Nokia Developer Relations Manager said, “We are making it easier to develop and get published by improving our tools and enhancing the experience. On the ground, we have increased our Forum Nokia resources to enable us to directly service and support the developer community.” He added, “The reach of Ovi Store provides tremendous opportunities for developers with an active user base in more than 190 countries. Today, developers can distribute apps to approximately 175 million Nokia Symbian smartphones - the largest smartphone user base in the world.”
Major improvements in developer tools include significant enhancements to the Nokia Qt Software Development Kit (SDK) resulting in a 70 percent reduction in the number of lines of code required when developing for the company’s family of Symbian smartphones.
“QT is simple and elegant. It takes away the noise and leaves you with the simple pleasure of programming. It is the Satie of the C++ world,” said Jawad Riachi, from Liquid-D in the UAE.
Wael El Zanaty, from GoodNews4me in Egypt, said "Qt simplified many things for us and gave us more time to focus on the application functionality. It enabled us to build a modern UI for our application using transitions and animations. It’s also allowing us to distribute our application to a wider range of devices using the same code.”
The Ovi Store has reached the milestone of 2.3 million downloads per day worldwide, with 70 developers and publishers each surpassing the million download mark for their content in the Ovi Store.
New updates for developers include Nokia signing Symbian and Java apps for free. “Publishers will not have to pay to get a publisher ID or pay to have their apps signed,” said Nawar. “This greatly simplifies the publishing process by making it a one-stop process for publishers. Nokia has also reduced the publisher fee to 1 Euro, making it easier for students and young entrepreneurs to publish on Ovi.”
Forum Nokia is also now offering two services for Remote Device Access (RDA), providing developers with working Nokia devices over the Internet. There is the free Remote Device Access and the Forum Nokia Virtual Developer Lab powered by DeviceAnywhere. Using RDA, developers can easily test and demo their apps prior to final release. In addition, DeviceAnywhere hosts weekly "tutorials" on the Ovi Daily App blog that demonstrate key features & functionality of leading apps in Ovi Store.
Moreover, to get the latest and historical Ovi Store statistics, Nokia developers, business people and others now have one official location on the Forum Nokia website.
Improvements are also in the Ovi Store user experience including a new look and feel, making it faster and making apps easier to find. Moreover, Nokia has increased monetization opportunities for developers, including free Java and Symbian signing, in-app purchase, improved revenue share, and advanced developer analytics.
