Nokia to give students shot at mobile app market

NOKIA Philippines aims to create an industry of local mobile applications developers in the country.

The firm would want to create an industry of developers in the country starting from the student level, said  Rhomel Marcojos, Nokia Philippines head for ecosystems and developer experience, in a press conference last week.

To roll out the project, Nokia Philippines has partnered with De La Salle University to launch a competition that aims to attract more young local developers to publish applications in Nokia Store and participate in the global mobile app phenomenon.

Dubbed the Xtreme Java: National Interschool Mobile App Development Challenge, registration is now accepted at https://netcentric.dslu.edu.ph/extreme java until Feb. 15.

Winning teams’ applications will then be published in Nokia Store plus total prizes estimated to reach at least P150,000.

Global Phenomenon

The number of app downloads from the Nokia Store had increased dramatically, said Marcojos.

He said this would be an opportunity for local developers to get a shot at the big untapped market of app downloads.

“Our latest data showed that globally, we had 11 million downloads from our Nokia Store a day. The Philippines had 6.5 million downloads as of last quarter of last year. This month, we estimate around 2.5 million downloads a day, which was only 400,000 daily in 2010,” said Marcojos.

Out of the total number of downloads, 60 percent are applications for Symbian platforms, which according to Marcojos only shows that a lot of people are still actively using their Symbian phones.

Based on an article they pulled out from TechPinas published on Jan. 27, 2011, Symbian is still the leading OS (operating system) in the Philippines with 46.88 percent share while iOS and Android make up only 32 percent combined share.

Nokia is using the Symbian as the OS for its phones.

Last year, a local personalization apps publisher has generated 35 million downloads from Nokia Store globally while another local game apps publisher has generated a million downloads.

“This only shows that the money is still in developing applications for Symbian OS or Java applications for our local developers,” said Marcojos.

Venue

There are more than 177 publishers in Nokia Store that has achieved over 1 million downloads last year, three from the Philippines.

“We’d like to increase that and we want to see more local developers participating. We believe that we have the capability, we only need the push to publish our apps and we would like to provide that venue for the local developers through Nokia Store,” said Marcojos.