Downloads from Nokia's (NYSE:NOK) Ovi Store now total 3 million each day, up from 2 million in September, with the handset maker on pace to exceed 1 billion downloads per year. In the weeks since the Sept. 30 launch of the Symbian-based Nokia N8 smartphone, Rovio's blockbuster game Angry Birds leads all premium Ovi Store downloads worldwide, while CellApp Technology's Q Torch flashlight solution tops the free downloads category. More than 250,000 new consumers worldwide now sign up for Ovi every day, Nokia reports, while more than 92 Ovi Store developers have topped the 1 million download mark.
Ovi Store director of product management Michael Bramlage states that mobile applications now represent over 70 percent of all Ovi Store downloads. "The most interesting thing isn't the number of downloads itself but the hockey-stick growth rate we're seeing," Bramlage said in an interview with FierceDeveloper. "In the last 60 days, we've gone from 2 million downloads a day to 3 million--that's much faster than the increase from 1 million to 2 million."
Bramlage credited Ovi Store's recent growth to a more seamless customer experience and the steady influx of new content from developers and publishers, as well as improved device capabilities. "Users on the N8 have a higher propensity to visit and download content from the Ovi Store," he said. "A lot of the growth is also due to increasing market awareness. We had to educate users, and now we've uncovered a global appetite for applications and games."
Nokia adds that more than 1.5 million developers have now downloaded its cross-platform Qt Software Development Toolkit. Last month, the company said it will embrace the Qt cross-platform development environment as its sole application creation framework--moving forward, developers who build apps in Qt will be able to deploy their software across devices running both the Symbian and MeeGo operating systems. Nokia adds it will create its own applications and UI in Qt as well, also committing to the HTML5 standard for web content and apps across both Symbian and MeeGo.
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