In a bullish talk at Nokia World 2010, George Linardos, Nokia's Ovi Store boss (technically vice president, product, media, Nokia) spoke about the momentum of the mobile application store, both in terms of its global and local reach.

"I don't care how many apps I have on the Ovi Store," Linardos said of the regular comparisons made to the 250,000 apps now available on Apple's App Store.

"What I care about is that we have the right app for the right person at the right time. This is a media play. It's not the quantity. It's about the quality. We can put Facebook on every Nokia phone across the world, or we can do specific cultural recommendations."

Going global, acting local

Indeed, he pointed out Ovi Store is the most international mobile app store with over 190 countries supported, 91 operators, 30 languages and operator billing in 27 markets."

"Over 90 percent of our mobile consumers do so within a localised store," Linardos said.

This currently results in over 2 million daily downloads, of which 85 percent is return traffic and each user downloading 2.6 apps per day.

Making it easy

The headline news of the talk however was the announcement that Ovi Store will allow in-app purchases in early 2011.

It will support this via operator billing; something Linardos said no other company can offer and that was was massively more popular amongst consumers than using credit cards.

Even more impressive though, this links into a fixed rate revenue share of 60 percent to developers and 40 percent to Nokia. This rate is used for all operator billing transactins.

This streamlines the previous issue of operator billing where the usual 70:30 application store split was confused by variable operator costs when operator billing was used.

The 70:30 split remains in place for credit card transactions.

To that extent, Nokia is subsiding the business to make the maths clearer. It predicts developers will gain 40 percent more revenue than they get with the current split.

Smooth experience

Work has also been carried out to improve the usability of the store.

"The store has gotten out of the way of itself," Linardos said, of the redesign, which has covered devices from the N8 to Series 40.

"The store offers improved visual design and better performance. I can’t stress the amount of effort that has gone into this.

"In 80 percent of cases, we have improved speed and multitasking within the shopping and browsing. And in 35 percent of cases, we exceed industry benchmarks i.e. App Store and Android Market."

Solid, sustainable

It all builds into what Linardos claims is an opportunity for developers to build their business with scale and volume.

"Three percent of developers making 50 percent of the profit is not building your business. That's a lottery," he said, of the situation on rival Apple's App Store.

"It's taken us some time but now we've got the juggernaut rolling. We are committed to grow Ovi Store so everyone is successful," he ended.