• Ovi Store Launched - All Hell Breaks Loose

    Ovi Store Launched - All Hell Breaks Loose

    Rahul Srinivas, May 27, 2009 1452 hrs IST

    After a lot of hiccups, it is up, running

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It was supposed to be the biggest answer to Apple's App Store - hyped and talked about almost daily ever since Nokia had announced its intentions to launch an App Store. On May 26, the Ovi store finally went live. Although there were initial reports of the Store going live in certain parts of the world, the official confirmation came hours later.



It seems that the launch was jinxed right from the first press release, announcing the launch. Nokia goofed up on the all-important link and those who had received the first release, ended up with a "page not found" error upon clicking the link to the Store provided in the press release. Nokia quickly followed the release with a corrected one. But then, the day had only started. Those who did manage to find the correct link were greeted with slow response times, disappearing applications and in some cases, the same application listed twice.

That was about the web interface of the store. On the mobile front too, things were not easy. The mobile site, accessible on http://store.ovi.mobi, too was down and slow almost the whole of yesterday. TechCrunch's Robin Wauters was extremely harsh and even termed the launch a "Complete Disaster". Nokia followed up with a blog post blaming the extraordinary spike in traffic for the downtime. The process of "adding more servers" slowed things further, the blog post added. Now, I am not sure why Nokia did not anticipate this huge surge in traffic. Even at the time of launch, the Ovi Store happens to be the largest of any App Store with a potential 50 million users out there. In comparison, there are only around 20 million iPhones. It leaves me wondering why Nokia did not anticipate an (expected) surge in traffic.



As for the rough edges, here are some of the things which we had noticed. Firstly, those with older Series 60 phones like the N73 and the likes had a tough time accessing the store because Nokia never informed that the mobile version of the store was accessible only from the "Services" option and not the full HTML "Web" browser. Newer devices, if you notice, come with a single "default" browser. Even if users visited the store using the WAP browser, the site failed to detect that it was an N73 and you end up frustrated as there seems to be no way to install the all-important Ovi Store application on your device, incidentally the only thing that was working yesterday. The location specific "Download" application too wasn't updated with the option for the Ovi Store client installation.

On newer devices though, the application was easily downloadable and worked smoothly. Nokia could have done a better job of providing an FAQ on how to install the mobile client on the phone, or rather have provided a downloadable SIS file on the Ovi website from where people can install the client to their phones, instead of finding crooked ways to download the application. It could have been so much simpler, Nokia. Another thing we have noticed is that the predecessor to Ovi Store, MOSH is still up and running!

Anyway, a day later, things seem to have smoothened out and apart from a few rough edges, the Ovi Store is up, running, and ready to roll! Expect a first look of the Store soon after this article.

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Tag keywords
Nokia Ovi Nokia Ovi Store Ovi Store N73 Apple App Store Apple



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