Comments on: ShoZu Launches Its Own App Store

By: Joseph

Joseph — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:23:25 +0000

Thanks for explanation and obviously I, personally, am not satisfied about nokia’s strategy from ovi. I don’t mean ovi was wrong move but they are sucking developers blood, only 30% of what customer pays, that’s shame, it seems(I don’t know) like even enthusiastic (freeware) developer will left their product ready to launch (i guess they have to pay for providing free app, another really important point being their signing issue which for a hobby freeware developer seems to be probably more complicated than ovi store thing). Ahh what about those yahoo, gmail, facebook etc complaining me after using shozu, the flooding complains!

By: Sim

Sim — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:16:02 +0000

Ricky and all fellas.

Shozu is just fine atm. You can disable all background processes and memory consumption is not a problem. I am willing to pay few bucks for sure. Shozu Store beats Ovi Store hands down lol.

I am using Shozu on my N97.

By: TheGuru

TheGuru — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:28:34 +0000

To be honest, in my initial knee-jerk reaction, I thought they were going to completely pull their app from all the app stores, and *only* sell through their own site (which would have been a completely bonehead move, I think). Having the app in *all* app stores (including their own) isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I suppose (and @Andy, I hadn’t thought of that – excellent point).

It’s not hard to see that the Ovi Store needs help – badly. I mean, heck, we advertise our Symbian-Guru Store heavily (and actively help recruit more developers to list their apps there, too). It just seems……backwards.

By: Manny

Manny — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:41:07 +0000

Thanks for the post, glad you like the changes.

I will try and explain our reasoning behind launching the ShoZu AppStore without the marketing spin, which incidentally was a last minute choice of name to grab peoples attention and not its official name, we don’t have a ShoZu AppStore just a place to download ShoZu from.

Allowing downloads of our application from our website was a decision we made partly prompted because users were struggling to find or download ShoZu from within the Ovi store, the Ovi store problems are well documented but try searching for ShoZu in Ovi, you get about 10 resulting apps, none of them are ShoZu, but in addition to the store itself the submission process was incredibly long and we are not expecting this to improve in the future, although other stores i.e. Marketplace/AppWorld/Samsung etc are better, this process can still take a long time and very time consuming and means users will have to wait longer for updates to ShoZu.

Also as Andy Nugent points out above although the Apple AppStore is quite generous to its developers allowing them to keep 70% of the cost of an application, Ovi store is not and its more like 30% to developer, the others store are somewhere between the two.

Being able to download ShoZu from the website gives the user a choice, they can either navigate their way through their phones menus and download via the phones store which is not always ideal, or come to the website and get a sign up/download process tailored for ShoZu

Thanks

Neil Pepper
ShoZu Mobile Architect

PS Contrary to the Press release, the only way to get ShoZu on an iPhone is still the AppStore, think that was the press guys just getting a little bit carried away.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:18:44 +0000

At first (years back) I thought applications are basically sold from developers site and as to make users aware about their products they use third party application stores. So basically I think that should be the obvious way of selling apps. But I didn’t liked the term shozu application store, I mean it sounds like there’s number of apps for sell (at least to me). I was (probably am) also great fan of shozu but after using it for few months (it was free at that time), my yahoo, Gmail, facebook etc etc started saying an application (shozu) is flooding your contacts with im/we have discovered your password is weak etc etc and finally I have to disable shozu from my accounts and I was forced to change my password. Whatever shozu was great application to make my uploads easy, real easy and I used to upload few photos a day but have left it later, one reason being its no more freeware. But I always wondered how freeware COMPANIES survive, if its a personal yes there seems to be a way out(job on one hand and app as hobby) but how a company survives.

By: Hugo

Hugo — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:40:21 +0000

I agree with what Andy said.

And what’s wrong with the consumer having a choice of stores to buy from, including the manufacturer itself? If you buy direct, it might be cheaper.

There’s been the my-symbian.com store for years, amongst others, and developers have been selling stuff directly themselves as well. You can buy Gravity for 10 euros from Ovi, or 6.48 euros direct from Mobileways.de.

This goes for “real world” products too, not just software downloads. Would you prefer monopolies, like in Finland where you can only buy wine and spirits form the state-controlled Alko, or would you prefer to be able to buy from a choice of supermarkets and stores, where you can shop around for the best deal.

And soon Symbian Horizon will make applications available on a number of app stores.

I don’t get the fuss. It’s presumably just because they called it an App Store!

By: Andy Nugent

Andy Nugent — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:26:54 +0000

I think you need to consider (and possibly something that you can write about on your site as most people seem to be unaware of) is how little of the actual sale price the developer receives when using the Ovi Store.

Tax is generally 15%
Operator billing is between 40%-50% (and people complain if this isn’t available)
Ovi charges 30%

So for a $10 app (which people would consider to be expensive):

$10 – 15% = $8.50 [tax]
$8.50 – 40% = $5.10 [operator min]
$5.10 – 30% = $3.57 [Ovi]

Apple App Store is slightly better in that they don’t have operator billing.

That’s ultimately why Shozu have started selling from their own website. If you have the traffic going to your site, why not sell directly and cut out the middle men?