Last year, Nokia’s OVI store announced a few updates worldwide and one of the major announcement was partnership with operators enabling consumers to purchase apps via operator billing.
While it took some time for India rollout, the good news is that Nokia has announced partnership with Reliance Communications to offer integrated operator billing for their consumers in India enabling access to a host of paid for content on the Ovi Store. The amount will be either included in their monthly mobile phone bills or deducted from the pre-paid balance, per their data plans.
Launched in 2009, the Ovi Store has 4 million downloads per day globally and India currently sees more than 4.5 million downloads a week.
This is quite a milestone for OVi store as operator billing can do wonders to app consumption (as seen with Airtel app store). Though revenue share between operator and OVI isn’t yet known, operator generally gets around 40-50% of of the price paid by the consumer.
- Ovi Store attracts 3.5 million downloads a day, with an average of 2.6 apps downloaded per visit.
- About 90% of Ovi Store traffic converts to downloads.
- Of Ovi Store’s signed-in users, 85% are repeat visitors.
- Each active user averages 8.5 downloads per month.
- Active users represent more than 190 countries.
- Games are No. 1 among paid downloads, and apps are No.1 among free downloads.
- 40% of the content downloaded are games and 30% are apps.
- 90% of Ovi Store users have Ovi Store in their local languages.
- 400,000 new Forum Nokia developers were added in the last 12 months.
- 92 publishers have over 1 million downloads each on Ovi Store.
Top Devices in India Using OVI Store: 5230, 5233, 5235, 2700 classic, 5130 XpressMusic, 5800 XpressMusic, E63, E71, N8-00, and X6-00.
What’s your take on OVI/Reliance partnership? When will Android bring payment mechanism to Indian app developers?
Recommended Read: What Do Telecom Operators Want? [A Look At App Platform Strategy]
