While listening to All About Symbian podcast epsiode 154, one sound bite jumped out at me. At around 21 minutes and 20 seconds in, Rafe Blandford asked Jan Ole Suhr, the one man development shop who is best known for his Twitter client called Gravity, what is the revenue split from the Ovi Store, Handango, and other application stores versus his own website. Bit of back story: on June 2 of this year, Eric John from the Ovi Store team posted a blog entry stating that Gravity was the number one selling application. The statistics haven’t been updated since then, but hypothetically speaking let us pretend that today it is still the number one selling application. Jan said that “around 90%, probably even more than 90% came from my own website”. Is this a sign of how badly Nokia’s Ovi Store is doing right now? One would think that with the millions of devices out on the market now with Ovi Store built in that they would launch it, discover Gravity, and buy it, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. There are even commercials running in the UK, a country where Twitter is very popular, showcasing Gravity and the Ovi Store.
The whole point of application stores is to expose people to the applications they can install on their devices, and to give developers an easy way to monetize their applications. If the revenue coming from the number one selling application in the Ovi Store is less than 10% of total sales, then what the hell happened?