Nokia Ovi Store

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

~ the eulogy ~

the ovi store's peak years overlap with the period i was already on android, so the practical distance is real. in 2009 i had moved from a feature-phone nokia to an htc android device on a turkish carrier, the ovi store was the parallel universe i could read about but did not have to live inside. nokia phones were everywhere in turkey through the 2000s, the brand had been the default mobile vendor for most of my friends and family, but by the time the ovi store launched the iphone and android wave had already started to pull engineer-tier users off symbian.

i was not paying close attention by then. anyway, ovi was nokia's umbrella brand for online services starting in august 2007, covering email, maps, music, files, and the ovi store as the app-distribution piece. the ovi store launched on may 26 2009 across about fifty countries with a few thousand applications at the start. by august 2011 nokia reported the store was serving about ten million downloads a day with around one hundred and sixteen thousand applications in the catalog by late 2011, which put it behind the apple app store and android market in scale but ahead of the other smartphone-os stores of the same window.

the brand consolidation came in may 2011 with a wider plan to drop the ovi name. the rebrand to nokia store finished in 2012, by which time the symbian decline was already cooked. microsoft acquired the nokia devices and services business in a deal that closed in april 2014. the s40 store was retired in early 2014 with the symbian portion winding down across the year. the nokia store as a brand was fully sunset on january 1 2015. existing users were pointed at the opera mobile store for a while as a download path for legacy apps.

for me. nokia had the dominant mobile share in turkey through 2008, the 6600 and n70 and n95 were the phones every engineering classmate i knew was carrying. by the time the ovi store was the place to get apps for those phones, the same crowd had already started moving to android. the store outlasted the consumer enthusiasm for symbian by about three years. the microsoft retirement was administrative cleanup more than a real cultural shutdown event.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the apple app store opened in july 2008 and reset the expectations for what a mobile app marketplace looked like. nokia's response was the ovi store nine months later. the practical problem was that symbian s60 had not been designed around a one-tap install pattern. the sis package format predated app stores, the signing requirements were a moving target, the older nokia devices that still had wide installed bases ran symbian versions the store either did not support or supported badly. so the store launch shipped on the new touch hardware like the 5800 xpressmusic and the n97 but felt awkward on the older keypad phones that were still most of the symbian fleet.

the catalog itself grew quickly through 2010 and 2011, the symbian dev community had been there since before the store and had products to publish. honestly, the inventory was strong, the discovery layer was the weak point. ovi maps as a free turn-by-turn product was bundled by nokia and was a real differentiator for a while. the store's first-party apps mostly came through that bundle path rather than through user discovery on the store itself.

~ the actual end ~

stephen elop's february 2011 "burning platform" memo was the moment symbian's commercial future got written off inside nokia. the microsoft partnership announced the same week pointed nokia at windows phone for the high end and held symbian for low-end carry-over. the ovi store kept running because the existing symbian install base still needed an app source, but the new-product pipeline had moved.

the microsoft devices acquisition closed in april 2014 and the wind-down accelerated. nokia store stopped accepting new s40 content payments in early 2014, the symbian content portion of the store was retired across the year, the storefront as a whole closed on january 1 2015. the opera mobile store picked up some of the orphaned audience for a while. the symbian dev tools and the signing infrastructure went away in parallel. by 2016 the cleanest path to load an old app onto an old nokia was a manual sis sideload from an archive site.

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