Ovi Store Hits 5 Million Downloads A Day

nokia-ovi-storeAfter quite some brouhaha over the Nokia and Microsoft partnership it appears that Nokia at present is just making news with its Ovi Store. In a recent release Nokia shared pretty impressive stats on the number of downloads at the store; 5 million downloads a day. That’s more than just impressive, meaning that Nokia is still a force to be reckoned with.

Those numbers also bring a lot of encouragement for developers given the fact that 158 of them from 41 different countries have managed to hit the 1 million download mark. I am not going to go further back in history but the Store has grown to over 40,000 apps, almost 8 times in the last one year with almost a 1,000 apps being added daily. As a brand, Nokia is still the leader when it comes to smartphone users with the numbers reaching a staggering 200 million. But why the spike in the number of downloads?

There can be many reasons, free applications, are obviously the main. But I guess the option to have operator billing enabled for users to make purchases is another major reason. Especially for the fact that no one wants to go through the hassle of taking the longer route of buying these applications. This could be due to security concerns, despite stores promising to provide the most secure payment methods.

The benefits aren’t just for developers or the Nokia Ovi Store but also for the operators, since Nokia’s devices are integrated to over 112 operators spread over 36 markets. Add to this the coming of in app payments also being extended to the S40 devices, which will increase the number of downloads exponentially.

There is definitely a lot of growth out there for the entire Nokia community. Just last November we reported on the Nokia Ovi Store figures. Back then the daily download figure was at 2.8 million a day. This means that in five months that figure has almost doubled.