Nokia Ovi Files

» see files.ovi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

nokia ovi files closed on 15 october 2010. the announcement came from nokia's ovi blog in early september with about six weeks of notice. it was one of the smaller shutdowns in a year full of nokia shutdowns. ovi files sat inside the ovi umbrella of services (ovi store, ovi mail, ovi music, ovi share, ovi contacts, ovi maps) that were mostly killed or renamed inside the following two years.

the product itself was a mirror service. you installed a small windows or mac client, pointed it at the folders on your computer you wanted to reach from your phone, and the ovi files server kept an index. from a symbian phone or a web browser you could then request any of those files and the desktop client would push a copy through nokia's servers to you. it worked like a very early precursor to what tonido and pogoplug did later, and to what dropbox did with a completely different design.

nokia ovi files sat in a category i was aware of but never subscribed to. i had a nokia n95 for a while in the late 2000s and never once opened ovi. by the time cloud file mirroring was a category i actually used, my phone was an android on ttnet and my sync tool was dropbox with its 2 gb free tier. ovi files was in the space where nokia's brand should have carried it, and did not.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

ovi files was built on avvenu inc., a small palo alto startup that nokia bought on 5 december 2007. avvenu had built what it called access and share: a remote-file protocol that let you address the files on your home pc from a browser without uploading them anywhere first. the master copy stayed on your machine. the server only kept an index of where files were and pushed cached previews. it was closer to a distributed file system than to what modern cloud storage looks like now.

nokia launched the rebadged product in july 2008 as a paid premium ovi service. it went free in july 2009 in a bid to grow past the small early user base. the free tier survived just over a year before nokia pulled the plug entirely.

~ the slide ~

the timing was the whole story. avvenu's design predated ubiquitous cloud storage. it was optimized for a world where broadband upload speeds were bad enough that keeping the master copy on your home pc made sense. dropbox launched in september 2008, two months after ovi files went beta. by 2010 dropbox had a million users and had made the sync-folder model the default expectation.

ovi files also depended on your home pc being on and connected when you wanted a file. mobile users on symbian phones were often the exact users whose home pc was off at the moment they needed something from it. the register's september 2010 shutdown piece was blunt: the service had "few users" and nokia was cutting its losses.

~ what got buried with it ~

ovi files never got a nokia-branded successor. the ovi share and ovi calendar services followed it through the exit door across 2011-2012. when microsoft's stephen elop took over nokia in september 2010 (the same month ovi files got its shutdown notice), the ovi brand was already scheduled to become nokia services and then to be folded into microsoft's own products. mobile file sync at nokia was over before windows phone had shipped its first device.

avvenu the company simply disappeared into nokia and then into microsoft. its founders scattered. the access and share technology stayed inside nokia's own device-sync tooling for a while, but the consumer-facing service was gone. dropbox by contrast had 25 million users by april 2011 and 200 million by november 2013. the category was decided long before ovi files noticed it was a category.

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