

84 percent of Nokia Ovi store app developers say Apple’s store is better - gspyrou
http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/29/84-percent-of-nokia-ovi-store-app-developers-say-apples-store-is-better/

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andreyf
What is it that any of these stores offer that the browser doesn't? Could we
(as an industry) focus on fixing those things, so that we can have an open
standard to develop apps across all devices, but at the same time take full
advantage of whatever the hardware offers? Which version of HTML is going to
support the multiple cameras that are (or soon will be) present on most of the
high-end phones sold?

Making software for full-featured mobile devices that degrades gracefully for
those with less features is a hard problem, but a very real one for phone
developers. The iPhone isn't going to be the extensively polished de facto
monopoly Apple dreamed it would be. Developers _do_ want to write cross-
platform applications (and no, Adobe doesn't have the right talent to write a
solid "higher order platform").

~~~
Mnoel
See, I had the same reaction when web apps started gaining traction: "Look at
all the native libraries and UI and tools you're giving up, just to solve the
app distribution problem! Solve that, don't take GUIs back 15 years just to
fix distribution!"

But, there is more to web apps than just distribution. And, there is more to
why people want to write for these mobile devices than just the app stores.

If you've been doing web stuff for a while, you may be surprised to find some
of us prefer the tools, APIs, and patterns behind native app development --
just as I was surprised to learn some people had legitimate reasons to make
web apps. Some of us have investments in native code that we can move over to
these devices. Some of us think having at least some code in the vendor's pet
API provides a better user experience, and makes you better able to track with
their platform as it changes.

I was wrong to think people only went to the web for distribution. Consider
that people may not just be on these native mobile systems for the app stores
alone.

~~~
andreyf
I don't think I made my point really clearly: what I was saying is that the
web as a platform needs to take whatever are the best tools, API's, and
patterns that exist in webOS/Android/iOS, of course. It's the fragmentation of
those well designed platforms that I'm seeing an issue with.

Maybe it's best to speak as a hypothetical "developer with an idea" that I'd
like to hypothesize to be common: I don't have time to become proficient in
developing on webOS/Android/iOS, and I don't want to do a half-assed job by
quickly learning a system I'm not familiar with, so I'll pick one (probably
iOS, because it provides the biggest reach internationally, and because I have
the sense that iOS users are more likely to pay money for apps). I'd prefer to
make one quality app, though, and ship it to all app stores, and have it
degrade gracefully across devices that have one feature or another. Also, a
pony. But seriously: I think Adobe's Flash-to-iOS is a great idea, but I have
close to 0 confidence in Adobe being able to maintain it & keep it up to date
with changes to the native platform. If Adobe had advocated making iPhone apps
by shipping a full-featured Flash-to-HTML5 compiler and vocally advocated
pushing HTML standards to reaching feature parity with the iPhone 4, it would
be a dream come true.

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wcoenen
Am I the only one annoyed by small surveys like this presenting their results
as if they have 1% accuracy?

Assuming that there are about 2000 ovi store developers and with the given
sample size of 104 respondents, the 90% confidence error bars on the result
are already +/-8%. And that's assuming the sample was properly random, which
was not the case.

~~~
deciara
You are right - it's not necessarily statistically significant. But surveys
like this don't have to be in order to give you a feeling for the mood of the
community. Also the respondents were recruited from the top Nokia developers
(based on downloads) rather than the entire developer population.

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codedivine
"Meanwhile, 63 percent of top Nokia developers say that publishing on the Ovi
store is still a good business decision."

~~~
stevenwei
Of the _top_ developers? Well, okay, but what about the percentage of all
developers (not just the ones whose apps are downloaded the most)?

I mean, if you reverse the number, 37% of the top developers think that
publishing on the Ovi store is a bad decision. That doesn't seem so great.

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zokier
The difference with Nokia and others is that with Nokia you don't have to use
the crappy Ovi store if you don't want to. N900 has relatively huge _open-
source_ community distributing their software via so called extras repository,
which allows easy distribution of software, without any filtering (it
basically has two levels, -devel and -testing. To get into testing you need
certain number of upvotes from community.)

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blub
"Nokia doesn’t seem to be doing a great job of communicating with developers."
The problem is that they offer only e-mail support and they're flooded because
they lowered the store fees to 1 EUR and allow apps made with an RSS -> app
creator into the store. This is one of those decisions that can look good on
paper, but in practice ends up having negative effects.

I haven't developed for Apple, but I do believe that the App Store is the best
store bar none right now.

~~~
codedivine
To offer my own experience, I sent them a question by email and I got an
answer within 2 days. Also, forums like forum nokia and qt forums are also
incredibly helpful and you get answers pretty fast.

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nextparadigms
Only 84%? I would've expected a higher percentage than that.

