Is Nokia Setting Itself Up for Failure with OVI Store?

 

Today (Monday 30th March) has been an interesting one with the release of Gravity by Jan Ole Suhr, sparking a lot of conversation on Twitter about pricing, distribution channels and adoption.

What has interested me about the conversations today was the thinking that as the S60 platform is so widespread that scale should allow the cost of apps to be less and that it was really only the lack of an Apple appstore type model for the S60 platform that prevented such adoption and therefore lower pricing.

Of course Nokia have had a directory of apps available on many of the S60 phones and are ramping up OVI to provide a full scale application store more akin to Apple’s offering but I think there may be something nasty lurking.  Something that may just derail Nokia’s efforts to build a centralised store from within.

The Groundworks

For many years Nokia users have grown accustomed to finding applications from developers on the web or via a number of well known stores such as Handango.  Those users were used to buying through a range of ecommerce providers, downloading and installing them themselves.  Those users were also, importantly, used taking responsibility for two key things;

1. ensuring that they only ran as many apps as their phone was capable of supporting at any one time or accepting the crashing from memory issues, and
2. not running applications concurrently that conflicted with resource requirements. 

In other words Nokia Smartphone users were anything but Normobs.  Nokia offered up devices that were designed to be pushed, to be played  with to be tweaked.  The Nokians responded by taking full advantage of this and the Normobs, well they used the phone pretty well out of the box as it did a lot very well indeed.

Another Paradigm Arises

Along came Apple with the iPhone which challenged and changed so many things in the mobile industry, not least of which was the attitude of Normobs to augment and extend their phone with a range of easily discoverable and affordable applications.

The app store was/is superbly simple to use. You find, you click, you play.  And because Apple had taken the decision early on not to allow such potential pitfalls as background tasks to occur, users could be fairly well assured that nothing they installed was likely to interfere with the core functionality of the phone itself.

Setting Up for a Fall

The landscape of users now pretty well falls into those who just use the device as intended (Normobs), those who will install and use apps in a managed environment (iPhoners) and those users who take on a whole pile of effort and responsibility to play with their devices (Nokians).  One could argue that G1 users are most alike to the Nokians in this model.

What Nokia’s OVI application store will do for users is afford Normobs the ability to discover, purchase and install applications in a more iPhoner way.

There is a problem I foresee.  S60 applications are far more complicated in nature that iPhone apps.  It’s C++ to HTML.  S60 apps are allowed and encouraged to utilise phone resources whilst in the background whereas iPhone apps are still awaiting the long promised polling from Apple.

I’m not arguing over which approach is the right one here.

But when OVI allows for applications to be easily installed onto S60 devices where those applications can compete for resource the stability of the device and in turn the user experience are in for a bashing.

How so?

Well if you install AppA & AppB on the iPhone, use and switch between them each closes down neatly leaving the path clear for the other.  The theory is the user never has to worry about the phone  not working as a phone or applications stalling core functionality.  The experience is always simple, easy and clean.

Switching between those same to apps on S60 no such rules are enforced and should there be a conflict, a memory leak or crash the user sees a fail. 

The issue for Nokia will be, I suspect, that users will blame OVI for the issue in much the same way Apple copped flak for such clashes.

Can the Fall be averted?

With so many people embedded into the iPod/iPhone mentallity of click and play sadly I suspect Nokia has left it far too late in the day to avert a PR disaster without spending truly huge sums of money on re-educating the public that apps bought through OVI just can’t be guaranteed to not create havoc in the same way that Apple can. 

Sure they could undertake an application testing/verification process but that would stiffle development and actually make things more expensive.

I have high hopes for OVI but after recent OVI experiences they are tempered with only moderate expectations.