Nokia MOSH

» see mosh.nokia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

mosh landed on nokia phones in august 2007. i was on an S60 handset in ankara in that window and remember the icon showing up in the nokia web menus at some point. mosh stood for mobilize and share, a name that reads like an internal slide-deck acronym because that is what it was. the site let anyone with a nokia account upload files and let anyone with an S60 browser pull them down.

the categories were audio, images, applications, games, videos, documents. the java MIDlet market had been fragmented across dozens of small portals in the 2005-2007 window; mosh's pitch was that nokia would consolidate that traffic on a first-party site and let users do the uploading. no screening beyond user flags, with a permanent beta banner on top of the page.

it worked, for a while. by mid-2009 the platform had passed 137 million downloads. a large share of that was, per nokia's own eventual admission, copyright-infringing content and adult material that nokia had not intended to host on a domain under its brand.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

mosh's timing was strange. in august 2007 the iphone had been out for a month and the app store was still a year away. the S60 ecosystem was still the largest smartphone platform by shipment volume, and nokia was trying to run the browser-first content model at exactly the moment the industry pivoted to native app stores gated by a publisher review.

on paper mosh had the demographic scale to be huge. every nokia S60 phone shipping globally in 2007-2009 had a nokia account attached to it, and the mosh site was one URL away from the browser home. the actual usage skewed toward java games ported from PC and toward ringtones and wallpaper packs, plus the copyrighted MP3s and the videos that would eventually push the whole thing over.

~ the fall ~

the no-moderation policy was the death timer. any takedown request needed to be filed and processed manually, and the volume of new uploads outpaced the takedown pipeline. the beta banner served as a legal fig leaf but did not survive scrutiny once music labels started sending notices in bulk.

ovi store was announced in early 2009 and launched in may of that year, with a gated review pipeline for publisher apps and a payment layer that mosh had never bothered to build. it took about eight months for nokia to make the internal decision to consolidate, and by early 2010 mosh had been folded in and the standalone URL was pointing at ovi.

~ what it became ~

mosh's inheritance went to ovi store, which died in january 2014, which then got picked up in windows phone and finally died again when microsoft mobile itself was wound down. nokia's mobile-content strategy ran through five graves in eight years and mosh was the first of them.

the interesting piece is that the shape mosh was trying for, user-uploaded mobile content on a browser-first URL under a manufacturer domain, has never really come back at scale. android and ios both moved that traffic into gated app stores and, for user-generated content, into third-party apps. the mosh model of the manufacturer running an unmoderated content hub is one of the shapes the mobile web never grew back.

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