Nokia announced Friday that its mobile app service, Ovi Store, had crossed the 2.3 million downloads per day mark. The world’s largest smartphone manufacturer (by unit sales, if not profit) also announced that it was getting some 200,000 new customers per day at Ovi Store.
Nokia has been steadily losing market share to Apple, Research In Motion, and now to the Android platform, as well, in the smartphone market, though the Finnish company is still the number cell phone (and smartphone) vendor by volume. After Apple immediately saw great success with the App Store, Nokia began working on Ovi Store, which opened in 2009.
The company also announced that 70 developers making apps for the platform have made a million dollars or more. By way of contrast, Apple announced earlier this year that it had paid out more than US$1 billion to its own iOS developers.
And speaking of contrast, Apple claimed during its September 1st media event that iOS users have downloaded more than 6.5 billion apps, and that current download rates were 200,000 per second, or more than 17.28 million downloads per day.
Still Nokia is showing some momentum, and the company announced a new version of the Qt SDK for developers, and a new look and feel for the Ovi Store itself. With the company’s strong foothold in Asia, in particular, it would be foolish to count the company out of the smartphone market, despite the strengths of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms.
The Nokia C6 with the new Ovi Store interface