Alessandro and myself were recently speaking with Forum Nokia on their Ovi App Wizard product, and the podcast of that conversation has just been released (Part 1 and Part 2). Thanks to Jason and Ung-Ping for the invitation to give my thoughts.
Posts Tagged ‘App Store’
Forum Nokia Podcast on Ovi App Wizard
Appland’s first iPhone App Now Available
Posted 20 Mar 2010 — by Dale
Category Appland, Development, Mobile
Category Appland, Development, Mobile
It’s always a nice feeling when something you work on is published and released into the wild, and so I’m happy to say that the first iPhone app developed by the Appland team here at VHA has just been approved by Apple – “My Easter Basket” (iTunes link).
The Appland team have some very specific goals when it comes to what we build, and some of them might not be what you would expect from a telco. That being said though, it’s surprising that a telco is building it’s own apps at all – but that’s what I love about working at VHA. One of the targets of our endeavours will be the free, novelty/fun type of app, or apps that work on a simple idea or perhaps single hardware feature of the device it’s used on – and My Easter Basket falls into this category.
With Easter fast approaching we thought it would be an ideal opportunity to launch something fun. We had the goals of 1) doing something unexpected for a teclo, 2) giving users something fun to play with that would hopefully create some chatter amongst friends about the app, and 3) to test the agility and speed of our new team. Some of these goals will only be able to be evaluated after some time, but we certainly succeeded in understanding how the new team can work under a bit of pressure. Read More
My experiment with free vs. paid on Nokia Ovi Store
I recently decided to do a small experiment with the Flash mobile game titles I have in the Nokia Ovi Store. They’ve been there from the very beginning of the Ovi Store at the lowest price point (1 EUR), and over the past months I’ve watched the sales dwindle to nearly zero. In saying that, I stopped marketing the apps at the end of 2009 when I started working for VHA, so to be completely fair I haven’t been putting anything into getting sales – which of course you need to do on any app store to see downloads!
So I wanted to see what the impact would be on an app that’s been in the Ovi Store for around 12 months if I turned it into a free app and continued to do no marketing (apart from what was already out in the open, which really at this point was a listing on oviflash.com). I went into the Ovi Store publish system (which has dramatically improved over the past 12 months in speed and stability) and chose one of the more (surprisingly) under-performing apps in our catalogue – Palleggio. And here’s what I discovered …
From March 2009 through to the end of Feb 2010, Palleggio (a football skills / juggling game) had a grand total of 63 paid downloads. For the first two weeks of March 2010, it had a total of 3302 free downloads.
Where were all these customers before when I was making money off these downloads hey?! So is this really surprising? No, not really – free VS paid is pretty much always skewed in this way. But does the radical jump in downloads indicate that the Ovi Store is easier for customers to download free content? Does it mean simply that Ovi Store customers (as like much of the app store patronage across devices and platforms) are LOOKING for free content? I wonder what I would see if I had a freemium version in there (i.e. a limited version of the game for free, plus a paid version with all the bells and whistles), as is the case with so many titles in the Apple App Store?
And while this might be seen in some quarters as poor app-store-etiquette, I’d be interested in doing another experiment and see what happens to the numbers if I change it back to a 1 EUR price point. If and when I do that, I’ll be sure to post the results here as well 
I’m also working with the Ovi App Wizard to create some free apps that include AdMob advertising – the results of those (Java and WRT) apps through the store will be an interesting read also!
Would be interested in hearing your thoughts and comments on your experiences with free VS paid content on Ovi Store.
Review of buying content on Ovi
Thought I’d show you the purchasing process in Ovi Store on the mobile client (yet to see what you can do through the website) as it happened when I purchased Darren’s Poker Solitaire Flash Lite game … Read More
App Store approval process a nightmare for developers – an opportunity for Ovi?
Via The iPhone Blog: The rumblings and grumblings over Apple’s App Store approval process are growing louder with the news that the recently submitted update to the Tweetie Twitter client was rejected for returning offensive words in the search results of the public Twitter “Trends” rankings.
There’s been a lot of complaining about the quality and consistency of the approval process for new and updated apps in the App Store, but this one seems to be potentially very damaging to the lure of the App Storefor developers. The business model is the best thing going for it – 70% cut of the sale price with no additional charges from telcos being taken off, but with the glut of content already in the App Store (see Mobclix’ stats on the makeup of the 27,000+ apps now online) time-to-market is very important for developers.
Having an uncertain approval process only makes it less enticing for developers to have a go. When some apps get approved and similar ones don’t, or when updates to previously accepted apps are rejected because of functionality that was already there, or content that is brought in from the web and not controlled by the developer (nor could it be by Apple with it’s own tools like Safari!), it makes new developers particularly more cautious.
This is a message that Nokia and Ovi should be listening to. The business model for Publish To Ovi looks similar to the App Store, but because customers can still pay by SMS, the operators are still entitled to a slice of your 70% rev share. Given my experience with Nokia Download, I have some idea as to what operator involvement can mean to the end revenue for developers, but I’m going to give Ovi a go regardless.
As Ovi’s publisher approval process has yet to be completed, I can’t comment on what that looks like, but if I were Nokia right now, I would be making sure that the message I was sending to developers was reassuring them that the approval process was a lot smoother than “some other app stores” out there. After investing blood, sweat, tears and in some cases real cash, developers don’t want to be tripped up in the process of just getting it our to customers through these types of channels.
Who knows, perhaps we’ll see the same trend with Ovi, Android Market and other OEM-driven app stores that we saw with the iPhone App Store – those who got in early were the biggest winners because content discovery for them was easier with less content cluttering up the deck. Perhaps with the wider variety of devices (and sheer greater number of devices compared to the iPhone) Ovi publishers will find it easier to cut through and achieve some “real” sales and generate a reasonable return on investment. Time will tell …
