Nokia announces Arabic Ovi Store

Consumers enjoy a seamless Nokia’sOvi Store experience in their own language with additional features


Dubai, 14th June 2011 - Nokia has announced full Arabic support for its popular Ovi Store across all existing platforms. Consumers whose devices are set to the Arabic language user interface will automatically view the Ovi Store in Arabic when entering.
“Arabic is the third most spoken language in the world with more than 300 Million native speakers,” said Tom Farrell, General Manager, Nokia Lower Gulf. “We are very excited to now offer these consumers access to Nokia’s Ovi Store on a broad range of Nokia smartphones and mobile devices in their mother tongue.”

The majority of Arabic speaking consumers are located in the Middle East and Africa region where Nokia has seen significant growth in Ovi Store downloads. Primarily Arabic speaking countries account for almost 75% of the overall MEA downloads, with Saudi ranking amongst the world’s top 10 download countries and UAE and Egypt in the top 25 globally.

There are also three local developers from MEA whose applications have each surpassed the 1 million download mark.One of these is a Java based application “FunSMS” created by Edumid in Pakistan. The application has been downloaded by consumers from almost sixty different countries, highlighting the local relevance and global opportunity that Nokia’s Ovi Store offers developers and content publishers. Another local success story is AsgaTech from Egypt who has published a number of apps on Ovi Store, resulting in a cumulative 2 million downloads to date.
In addition to Arabic support, the latest version of Ovi Store brings enhanced consumer features such as application updates, popularity calculations and Web apps for Series 40 devices. Application updates automatically notify consumers of any updates to apps that they have already downloaded. This means that consumers will always have the latest version of their favourite apps without needing to manually search the store for later versions.

Improved popularity calculations help to sort and rank relevant content based on popularity by country and device, ensuring that consumers are served the most relevant apps while support for Web apps provides consumers with a wider set of content choices on Series 40 devices.
“We are very pleased with the traction that Nokia’s Ovi Store has had in the MEA region. Being able to now offer this service with enhanced features and seamlessly in Arabic means not only providing a better experience for existing users, but also the potential to reach new users who only speak Arabic. We already have a good number of local applications on the store and hope that these can now be enjoyed by many more consumers,” added Farrell.