Nokia: All eyes on developers

The Express Tribune catches up with the Nokia team at Calling All Innovators Pakistan 2010.

KARACHI: Over the past few years, Nokia has received much criticism for being inflexible – a reason many analysts predict will eventually lead to its downfall. However, the Finnish mobile phone giant is in no mood to give up. “We have listened to criticism and reacted,” says Adeel Hashmi, Nokia’s communication manager for Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Express Tribune caught up with the Nokia team at Calling All Innovators Pakistan 2010, a competition for local mobile application developers held recently. Local relevance, solutions and discoverability were some of the phrases that kept coming up during an interview with Teemu Kiijarvi, developer relations manager for Middle East and Africa and Hashmi.

“Developer, developers, developers – that is all you will hear these days at Nokia, right up to the CEO,” said Kiijarvi. It seems that the company is serious about encouraging local developers to make applications for its online global marketplace: the Ovi Store.

Not only did they hand over Rs2.3 million in cash prizes to winners of the competition, the creation of specific positions within the company to handle relations with developers in the region bears testimony to the initiatives Nokia is taking to bridge the gap with publishers and fend off the rising popularity of other smartphones like the BlackBerry, iPhone and of course phones running the Android.

New framework

“The new Qt SDK application development framework we have introduced has removed up to 70 per cent of the code and hence made it easier for programmers,” explained Kiijarvi. “It is now possible for anyone to publish.” He added that Forum Nokia, the global developer community, provided complete support to anyone who was interested in publishing apps – from online tutorials to providing sample code.

Responding to a question about why developers would choose to make applications for Nokia instead of the more popular Apple App Store, Hashmi highlighted a very important point: Nokia still remains the market leader in Pakistan. Estimates of the company’s share in the domestic mobile phone market range between 50 and 80 per cent.

With a revenue-sharing model that allows developers to earn up to 70 per cent of the income generated for app sales, the company seems to be heading in the right direction. “The whole purpose of holding the competition and coming to Pakistan was to meet developers face-to-face and make our presence felt.”

We are on time

Meanwhile, Hashmi is adamant that Nokia is not too late to enter the game: “If we would have come with a competition like Calling All Innovators four years back, the quality of apps would not have been that good.”

The good news for Nokia users is that all apps created on this platform will not only run on its Symbian but also MeeGo – the much-awaited new operating system which the company is counting on to regain its foothold in the smartphone market.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 26^th, 2010.