After attending the Nokia N8 launch and Ovi Developer sessions in London on the 3rd of August, which although good in message was pretty poor in delivery, I thought I would check out the Ovi Application Wizard to see what I could do with it. I have worked on something incredibly similar to this, in fact so similar it is quite scary, and I wanted to see how Nokia had gone about making their application wizard. Firstly, THANK YOU very much if you have downloaded the application and have had a look at it. That's very cool indeed and so far there have been almost 1500 downloads. In all honesty I did not think that there would be this many in such a short period of time. So thank you very much up front. The gripes in this blog are not directed at you!! ;-)
So onto the application. The Ovi Application Wizard allows you to enter the URL for a RSS feed or Atom feed and enter it into a text entry field. Push a button and wham, you have a presentation of what your Ovi application will look like on a handset. You then have the ability to upload an icon and change the colours on some of the items in your application before submitting it for approval by Nokia. After approval your application is available in the Ovi Application store for download to handsets that support Ovi. As an example you can download the application for this blog right here! As it stands it appears that this is the only application in the Ovi App store that has anything to do with gardening! ;-).
Nokia say that approval should take about 24 hours. It was a little longer for me but after about 36 hours I got an email telling me my application had been approved, followed by an email with my publishing credentials for the Ovi store. During the submission process the wizard led me to believe that I would have to pay 50 Euros to be able to publish my application (which I don't think I would have done), but as it turns out this was not the case. I received the email and the application had been published. I assume that I will be able to use the same account to publish further applications but I have not got around to that yet!
During the application definition phase you can also select to allow advertising to be added to your application. I decided against this, but it did seem to be pretty easy to do. You did have to set up an account with one of two different advertising providers that Nokia have done deals with. I don't know if this is an easy process as I did not do it. Still pretty good to be able to have advertising if you want it. Annoyingly, although I selected to not have advertising, the built application shows an advertisement for the Ovi application store instead of advertising that could be generating me revenue! Oh well not to worry. I guess it's fair for a referral back to the Ovi store given they have developed the tools to allow me to publish. ;-)
So my application for 'Mobile Technology and Gardening' has been in the Ovi App store for 3 days now and has been downloaded 1500 times across 102 diferent countries. Not too shabby for an unknown blog. This however is all I can tell you, and despite the ease of generating and publishing the application, this is where a few gripes will now start to surface!
OK so I know that my application has been downloaded 1500 times, but that's it! What I am missing from the reporting section in the Ovi Publishers interface is any other reporting. So I don't know how many of those that downloaded the app are using it. I don't know how many people have removed the application. I don't know how many page views I am getting, I don't know what devices are being used to view my content, etc... All pretty basic reporting that I would love to have. Google Analytics provides me a really cool interface for this information to show me who and how my blog is being published. From these reports I can see when is the best time to post for the greatest distribution, how people are accessing my blog entires, what pages are being accessed etc... There is so much I am able to do with some fairly basic reporting but I don't get this through the Ovi Publishing interface.
Unfortunately the Ovi Application Wizard acts as a proxy for my content as well, so it makes the request to download my blog and then the apps installed on device access content from the Ovi Application Wizard proxy. So no matter how many people actually use the application, my Google Analytics reports will only show the single access from the Ovi Application Wizard proxy. So I have almost no idea of how many people are actually looking at my content through an application generated from the Ovi Application Wizard. Not good! It should be reasonably easy for Nokia to generate reports on this data and add it to the publishing interface. Nokia, could you please look into doing this for us? It would make it a far more complete tool set if you did. Thanks very much in advance!
With respect to the format of the data in the application. Unfortunately any links that you include in the text of a story are stripped out of the content. This really sucks I am afraid as the internet is a collection of links with text, images and video to provide context. Removing links from a web page, renders it as static content that is not of real value to the end consumer. Sure there is a link at the bottom of each article that takes you to the original story, i.e. this blog, but that is well below the page fold, especially on my rambling blogs ;-), so it is very unlikely that users will access the original content.
There is an argument that I should tailor content for a specific medium, so perhaps for my Ovi App my blog entries should be more precise and too the point. Hey they aren't and it would be good if the link content in the stories was not stripped! That being said if I get more downloads, and better reporting I can make educated decisions about how I should tailor content for Ovi users and not guesses! :-(
Of course all these gripes could be overcome if I was not lazy and actually built the application myself. Then I would have full control of the content, could serve it from where ever I wanted and report on what ever I liked! This I did not do, but based on the numbers would seriously consider doing after getting my iPhone application and Android application out of the way first. So might update later, unless Nokia update the reporting first! ;-)
So in terms of distribution I cannot complain. 1500 downloads in a couple of days for an unknown blog. Great! Again THANK YOU very much for downloading. That's really cool. Thanks even more if you actually read this stuff!! ;-). In terms of reporting, and therefore a useful distribution tool, though, there is a long way to go. As I highlighted, if I develop my own application I can get around this as then I can control the reporting.
I cannot quite help thinking though that the Ovi Application Wizard through it's ease of use is simply going to generate 1000's of RSS widgets that will clog up the Ovi App Store. Although the content can differ between these apps in a sense it sanitises information on the internet. It starts to all look the same and as a result can decrease its value. If every application I download for Ovi looks the same then I am going to lose interest in downloading further applications. If there are 1000's of RSS apps and only very few rich apps then RSS is going to drown out the interesting applications that drive innovation and drive Customer support for a platform. Apple users and Android users don't flock to download RSS style applications. They flock to download augmented reality apps, games, apps that manage your house purchase, apps that track your fitness regime and apps that do your laundry (OK that is stretching it!). They don't typically download an application to look at a RSS feed. Variety is the spice of life and what makes folks want to discover more in an app store. If everything is RSS based then that's not interesting! Nokia should know this as well as Nokia Widsets was exactly this! 1000's of RSS widgets that became dull very quickly!
Still, it has been fun to engage with you Ovi users. If you have made it this far it would be great if you could click through to the full story on my blog so I can see if you are using the application. It's the 'See Original Story' link at the bottom of the page. My apologies for the links being removed from the blog entries as well. This is probably not a great user experience. Still thank you very much for all the downloads. Seriously I though there would be 10's and not 100's, so thank you very much! If I can see statistics for page loads from Nokia devices than I will work faster to get a proper Ovi application out the door! Thanks again!
Cheers
M
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