As we discussed, carrier billing is one of the areas where the Ovi Store has a huge advantage over any other mobile distribution method – and while this advantage won’t always be there, it’s unlikely to be overhauled by a competitor before this time next year at the earliest. Given the announcement of carrier billing and expansion was only made at Nokia World, this still needs a lot of traction to be recognised by potential developers.
The Ovi Store certainly doesn’t have an immediate refund option within 24 hours, and I’d agree with Hawkins here that this is likely to make management of the Android Store less of a headache by allowing a simple automated route – a route that’s open to abuse by the more unscrupulous user.
Certainly in retail sales, it’s long been the case that you couldn’t return computer apps for anything other than a replacement – no trying at home and deciding you just didn’t like it. Sometimes it felt a bit like buying blind, but that’s how it works since I started buying 16K games on audio tape for the ZX Spectrum.
What Nokia might want to look at is their obvious loophole of re-downloads. Once an application is bought on the Ovi Store, you can naturally download it again, but all you need is the login on another phone and boom – one app, one purchase, two handsets. Strictly speaking, there’s nothing wrong with this, but you can do it up to three times and a solution to work out which are downloads, re-downloads or multiple handsets might be something to think about.
Finally there’s the issue of competing ad networks – here Hawkins is looking specifically at the idea of using offer completion networks to facilitate the earning power of a mobile game (i.e. go and watch this trailer for a film to earn 4 credits, once you earn ten credits, you can get Cafe Solitaire for “free”).
Digital Chocolate's Cafe Solitaire on the N-Gage.
Just like Android and iOS, the Ovi Store doesn’t have this facility, but Symbian OS certainly makes it a lot easier to implement this outside of the recommended manufacturer's app store. It’s just not possible on an Apple device; and while Android doesn’t make it easy, you can install software from outside the Android Store, so just like Symbian OS, it is possible to code yourself.
To be honest, I don’t see the major store players including this sort of method for payment – it’s perceived to be right on the edge of acceptable practice, although I will acknowledge the huge income that can be gathered from this sort of approach (such as the growth of Zynga on Facebook with titles such as Farmville).
There are two things I take away from Hawkins' post and the associated issues. The first is that there is (still) no silver bullet in selling applications online. Neither is there such a thing as the perfect store environment. Just as any technology takes time to bed in and find the best practices and the methods that work, the online app store needs a number of iterations and plenty of blue sky thinking to be fit for purpose. Nokia has gone through that process with N-Gage, then Download! and now the Ovi Store, which has had numerous rolling updates through its life.
So the stores we see today, on all the platforms, are unlikely to be the stores we see next year. The smart companies are going to be the ones that balance the needs of the developer, the end-users, and themselves.
-- Ewan Spence, Oct 2010.
You can find Hawkins full post online at Game Theory.