May 20 2010

Ovi App Wizard: Create your own app, but not too many please

Posted by Norman John in Nokia, OVI, Ovi Store

With the Ovi app wizard everybody can create an application within less than ten minutes. Whether big sites like Engadget or small and new blogs with a small readership, it is accessible for everyone, free to use, no registration fees. Moreover, there are no design or programming experience needed. Just add up to 4 rss feeds, upload a logo, and customize the app colors – done! Hence, one can go ahead and contribute to the Ovi Store and also address a larger readership as this widget works nearly on every single device.

Problems:

I personally find it critical as now everybody can upload one or even more widgets and thus inundates the Ovi Store. Of course, many of those widgets/websites are useful but honestly I don’t see a real need for these apps or rather for these sites/blogs.

Moreover, there is also a problem coming from the Ovi Store itself: I edited my RSS-Feed to more decent one and suddenly my widget was rejected. After I contacted the Ovi Store Team I received following message:

“Website promoting competing products. SUMMARY: The application includes links to an external website instead of the Ovi Store. REQUIREMENT: According to the Ovi Store publisher registration and distribution agreement: “5.4. Non-Compete – You may not use the Program to distribute or make available any Content whose primary purpose is to facilitate the distribution of Content outside of the Program.” Promotion of external storefronts and websites with competing products are not allowed. Links to download the same content or other related content should be linked to the Ovi Store instead of the publisher’s own website or other distribution channels.”

Since we are offering not only Ovi Store downloads, this is frankly a no-go for us.

UPDATE: