Nokia hopes new app store will replicate App Store

The world's largest handset maker is refreshing the way it handles applications

Nokia has spent four years working on building an application distribution system, attracting millions of developers eager to sell to the hundreds of millions of Nokia phone users around the world.

But today few Nokia phone users actually download applications. It took Apple about a year to craft a system that its 15 million iPhone customers use to download applications at a far more frequent rate. According to research from ComScore, 59.2 percent of iPhone users have downloaded apps, a much higher percentage than among average mobile users.

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With its soon-to-launch Ovi store, Nokia hopes it has addressed the problems that have held it back in the past.

"When we started doing this, the state of the art was selling a photo of a cat," said George Linardos, vice president of Nokia Services, during a lunch meeting at the CTIA conference in Las Vegas on Thursday. Four years ago when Nokia started promoting the idea of downloading applications to phones, the most sophisticated option was adding photos.

Nokia progressed over the years, but in a disjointed fashion. About a year ago, it had several "first-generation" application services and none of them were linked, he said. A user could open the Download service folder on their phone and then navigate through different folder categories to find applications. Or the user could visit the Mosh Web site, which offered user-generated applications. The phone customer could also open the WidSets application to look for available widgets. "And by the way, there was a different user name and password for each," said Linardos.

About a year ago -- prior to the launch of the iPhone App Store, he says -- Nokia decided to look at the problems with its current systems. "It was obvious we needed just one store," he said.

The Ovi store, expected to open in May, is designed to take the best of the past offerings and add some new capabilities that Nokia hopes will give it a leg up over competitors. It is also designed to take the best ideas from other successful stores.

Apple's App Store is "a very user-friendly experience with a well-integrated buying process and a valuable business model for developers. It's a nice formula for Apple. We're applying the same principles to our hundreds of millions of devices," Linardos said.

One of the main differences with how the Ovi store works is the way it aims to solve possibly the biggest problem in the competitive stores: discoverability. The App Store, for example, ranks applications by number of downloads, and because there are tens of thousands of apps in the store, users focus on those top applications, ignoring the rest.