Ovi store developers un-appy

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Ovi store developers are certainly a surly bunch, with more than half of them unhappy with the way the Finnish phonemaker runs its app shop.

The dissatisfaction has been gleaned from a Mobile Application Markets developer satisfaction research report published by Open-First and distributed at the MobileBeat 2010 conference. It initially surveyed 100 of the top developers publishing mobile apps to the Nokia Ovi store, coming to the conclusion that many were severely disillusioned.
A whopping 42% complained the Ovi store was “below average” in comparison to Apple’s App Store and even to Google’s Android Market, with only a paltry 21% sticking up for Nokia’s offering and claiming it to be superior to the rest.

55% of Ovi developers were unhappy with how long the process of approval and posting took them, meaning their apps don’t show up in the store quite as quickly as most would like, with some even noting it could take “months.”

Fragmentation was also listed as a problem for Ovi developers with many complaining that Nokia simply has too many phones to design for, some with touch screens, others without, and a whole host of differences. Meanwhile, Android, which also spans a large number of devices, requires touch capability from its whole install base.
As if that wasn’t enough to whine about, the Ovi developers surveyed also professed serious disappointment with the revenue, or rather lack of it, gleaned from their hard work, with a whopping 70% even fessing up to having to earn their bread and butter on other platforms.

To its credit, however, Nokia has admitted to knowing it has a problem on the development front, with Oliver Gunasakera, head of North America global alliances for Symbian noting at MobileBeat recently that “not embracing developers fully was a failure,” but one Nokia hopes to remedy with its Qute multiplatform development environment.
“We believe in Qute,” said Gunasakera, adding “it is cross platform. Google earth is built with Qute. Developers are used to it and now we have it natively built in to Symbian.”
The problem is, that Symbian is quickly being phased out as operating system of choice for Nokia’s smartphones, being replaced with the firm’s MeeGo OS instead.
Still, a majority of the developers surveyed seem to be a forgiving bunch, with 80% saying they would stick by Nokia and Ovi with the expectation that their experience could only improve. 20% of the top developers surveyed gave no such commitment, indicating they could well dump the platform for Apple/Android greener pastures.

One thing is for sure, Nokia had better start stepping up its game if it want’s appier developers.