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Why should I build games and apps for Nokia – NOW?

By Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal on 19 Comments / 3943 views

This is the FIRST OF THE ‘ASK’ Questions on the new Category called ASK on therodinhoods.wpengine.com! You will notice the new ‘ASK!’ tab on the top!

 

Sure, its like Quora, but I believe that a tighter community with local members will add more value to questions that you and I may have. So, if you wanna ASK – just start up a normal discussion and then simply SAVE it in the ASK category at the end of the post!!

 

Now, to my ASK:

 


I’m not getting the plot.

 

Randomly my team and I get calls from the Nokia India Team to BUILD new Apps for their OVI STORES

 

These are the questions I have asked them that still remain unanswered:

 

  1. How do I benefit from free Nokia ‘apps’ when even advertising in them is not an easy format to understand (like putting ad-mob ads in Android/iPhone apps) or implement?

  2. How do Ovi Apps get distributed? The Indian telecom operators do not distribute Ovi – they distribute Apps that they want on their decks. So how do my Ovi/Nokia apps get discovered?

  3. Isn’t Ovi as a platform being phased out?

  4. If I make a ‘paid’  Nokia app – then how does the consumer pay for it? 

  5. Do these apps become redundant after Windows 7 becomes the Nokia platform? 

 

The BIG QUESTION than haunts me is – What is the 19 year old teenager in India BUYING NOW as a replacement to his Nokia Phone? 

 

If its an ANDROID device – then why should I bother with NOKIA?!

 

That’s part of the reason why the question remains relevant or…

 

Please tell…I am asking this as a sincere question…. Am i missing out on a bigger plot?

 

 

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19 Comments

  1. @Alok – I’d really like to know this too (especially the answer to question 5). My company started working on some Nokia stuff, but we shelved it after the surprise announcement about the adoption of Windows.

  2. Hmm .. I will not really make a case for Publishing on Ovi here ..

    Just sharing our experiences.

    The trends and momentum is surely with Android as of now.. or in Indian context, even with Blackberry ..

    Paid app on Ovi (Not recommended, due to whole credit card payment etc issues in Indian context where Ovi is huge)

    Free app on Ovi (recommended)

    Last month itself we have seen 300% rise in our apps downloaded from Ovi store ..(on a significant base)

    Interestingly majority of downloads are from India(expected), Italy and Saudi Arabia (Surely Ovi is doing something right in these countries)

    I heard a similar case for Turkey in one of the conferences ..

    A similar numbers or surge is also reported by spicelabs

    Some data points are available here (they are a year old)

  3. thanks Lalit!

  4. Another (may be negative) way to look at it is ..

    Look at quality of highest downloaded games / apps in Ovi or BB vs those on Android or iPhone app stores ..

    You will realise that the Nokia and BB users are obviously more hungry for “Quality” content cause they have also spent upwords of $500 for a “smart” phone.

    If you have a half decent app/game you are likely to get more attention on the app stores where the competition is relatively weak but usage is still high ..:-)

  5. Retrying since earlier reply threw an error! (annoying)

    People hate change. My cousin refused to buy Android phone as he was comfortable using the Symbian UI however crap it was. My suggestion would be to offer Symbian apps because:

    • Nokia already has a huge consumer base in India — and I suspect at least 30% of it are Symbian users.

    • I don’t think Symbian is going away anywhere at least till 2015. Nokia will keep manufacturing Symbian device and people will keep buying it, at least in India. Why? Because Nokia brand is still the most popular brand in India and people are already familiar with the Symbian UI. Check this

    • OVI Store now supports Operator billing. That is, if you buy an app from the store you no longer need to enter your credit card details, the amount will be deducted from your prepaid balance or added to your bill.

    You can of course choose to ignore but IMO it’s a huge market hungry for apps to be ignored, at least in India.

  6. makes a lot of sense. i think the OVI billing part was not know to me. having said that and experience the operator payout scene, that business is a demon in itself.

     

    thanks

  7. Nokia never really had symbian as its passionate platform. Nokia didnt have a vision in mind to work on the software and software ecosystem; the priority was always numbers of Handsets sold. Their lack of passion to sustain a developer ecosystem was clearly visible in their results, and why the “platform burned”  . Even now, they dont have a clear path ahead with their tie with Microsoft, so making something for nokia is a risky proposition ; rather beneficial is doing for android and iphone.

  8. @Lalit – but considering the cost and time of developing a quality app, might that not be worth it ? Especially considering the major amount of fragmentation.

     

    If you create an iPhone app and even forget about it afterwards, the money will still keep on rolling in – if only because the iPhone user base is growing.

     

    In case of Nokia devices, I just see a shrinking market in the future.

  9. Alok, 2 points:

     

    – the “other India” (as journos like to call – consumers in Tier II/III cities and lower middle income category consumer in larger cities)  – still buy Nokia phones.

    – Other interesting observations (no data point for this though!) – not-so-tech-savvy budget conscious women consumer still prefer Nokia phones.

     

    Reason for both is the same as – Apurva mentioned – familiarity of interface.

     

    So while Nokia may not be growing – the market is still “big enough” in India. And as Lalit mentioned, given that there isn’t much of quality stuff out there, it should be easy enough for you to be a king there – so what if it’s a smaller kingdom!

     

  10. I agree with that one – the lack of a clear roadmap is a major hindrance towards developers adopting their platform.

     

    And developers these days are especially wary (HP Touchpad anyone ?)

  11. To each his own ..

    Just out of curiosity have you found a way to make money with iPhone apps?

    Very curious to know cause this approach of “create an iPhone app and even forget about it afterwards, the money will still keep on rolling in” is new to me 

    To my knowledge, to make money of iPhone apps, there is significant user acquisition effort involved .. and even then the ad based monetization may not make it worthwhile .. paid apps seem to give better ROI but still getting noticed is an issue …

  12. u already have a game…its a trade off between porting cost v/s them money you’ll get [someday] from the telco. the nokia market is around for a while.

  13. Who says you can ignore your app once you’ve developed it for iOS/Android? Android has much more fragmentation issues. For eg some apps developed for WVGA do not work on HVGA screen. And from my observation most of the Android users in India use mid range Android handsets so developers will have to design two separate apps just for a single OS!

    Besides chances of your app getting discovered in OVI store are higher than in iOS and Android. Plus developers get free promotion from Nokia India.

    At the Nokia N8 Mumbai launch, Nokia India allowed a demo session for apps developed by Spice labs. I have never attended any Android/iOS demo sessions in India.

  14. @Apurva : Note that I did not mention Android, only iOS.

     

    And how many Indian users pay for apps ? Compare that to the vast mass of western users you are exposed to via the iOS app store.

  15. My view is that:

     

    – Indian’s are digital natives (the under 20’s) – they figure out new devices like no one can in the world.

     

    – Nokia phones will be SOLD – but my humble belief is that farmers, drivers and watchmen will buy them for VOICE – not apps

     

    – Android and the barbarians (all low cost phones) will make the Android platform the next ISD booth phenomena

  16. @Lalit :

    About monetizing : maybe it is because my field is medicine – people are willing to pay for stuff, since they see real value in it.

     

    Advertising is another option – again because the CPMs (assuming you obtain a targeted advertising deal) are much higher than that of general mobile advertising. Of course, obtaining a targeted ad deal is tricky 🙂

     

    About fire and forget: before I launched my current startup, I developed a few iOS apps – which I’ve since totally neglected. While they won’t make me a millionaire any time soon, I do get a decent revenue every month (more than the salary I used to earn as a doctor !)

     

     

  17. The question should not be about Nokia but the OS. Nokia has 4 different platforms – Meego, J2ME Symbian and Windows (and we wonder how they messed up). Meego is easy to ignore. J2ME is a different market and really a different question. Windows Phone like Android is a platform whose success/failure is not dependent on one hardware maker. 

     

    So the question becomes to develop or not to develop for Symbian. Here the answer also depends on whether you are developing an app or a game… Also as pointed out the answer depends on whether the app is free or paid for.  

     

    We have been contemplating the same and think we may need to develop for Symbian … Here is why : 

     

    Symbian is moving to the lower end of the market – Rs. 5-6k. A low end touch, Android phone is worse than a low end non touch phone – Yes I bought the Micromax Android. It has a resistive touch screen which makes using the phone masochistic. The newer micromax android  is a little better

    A proportion of the market really hates touch phones. They are bad at being a phone ! Sending SMS can be hard. The corby for example is a horrendous device being crawlingly slow at phone book etc. The comparison is a non touch phone at the same pricepoint. 

     

    Apps like SMS blockers, News hunt etc can thus thrive for a little while longer on Symbian. Large installed base plus the fact that apps experience is less dependent on touch. you can deliver a decent app experience without touch. Being free also helps.

     

    I am not sure the same applies to games which can be paid for. Touch delivers a supreme experience which is also agood reason to plonk money … 

     

    Oh and there is the idiotic short term  fact that Google has not really tied up a good payment experience for India yet !

     

    We developers of a free utility app exclusively focussed on India have decided to go for Symbian (after delivering an Android app)  – (Plan Hound – https://www.planhound.in) 

     

    That said I am keen to hear why I am wrong.  Or other peoples experience. 

  18. Alok, good points. Nokia guys never replied to the similar questions that i asked them. They seem disillusioned! 🙂

  19. Nokia has a skunkworks project.  It is modeled on the theory of the ‘borderless phone operating system’.  According to their top scientist the OS will be distributed free in the form of – wait for it – cream spread.  Take any piece of hard object – wood, metal, plastic, glass, anything.  Spread the cream on the surface.  Take your SIM and place it face down the cream.  Blow gently on the surface.  Wait for three minutes.  The surface will turn harder than a diamond. And you have a ready to go mobile phone that natively interfaces with all known and unknown operating systems.  The cream is a special goo of nanobots that get activated when the carbon-di-oxide in your breath kick starts them.  They draw energy from the background cosmic radiation so you are assured of never having to bother with batteries.  The SIM is an anachronism due to government regulations.  Nokia makes money from the apps that you access on their creamy platform. So to answer your question, yes Nokia is a good bet for mobile games, but will it help your bottom line? Not in the current event horizon.  😀

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