Fresh from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona held back at the end of March, everyone praised the biggest chance to Nokia’s resurrection, the new Nokia Windows Lumia smartphone range. I too was impressed when they unveiled the ultra sleek design and speedy Windows operating system. Thankfully they ditched Symbian! But even with all the hype around Nokia’s likely come back, it might take some time to attract developers to make apps on the Windows platform and consequently attract customers.
Bloomberg reported that Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds which recently released its newest game Angry Birds Space for iOS and Android, is not making a version for Windows yet. In a Bloomberg interview with the Mighty Eagle and Chief Marketing Officer of Rovio, Peter Vesterbacka said “it’s a big undertaking to support it, and you have to completely rewrite the application,” However it was reported by Reuters, that CEO Mikael Hed was working on creating the Windows 7 version.
By prioritising iPhone and Android over Windows, Rovio is signalling that it believes Windows is too nascent at this stage to be worth supporting. Money can’t be the problem, since Rovio is rolling in it having made US$100 million last year alone. Now that Rovio isn’t giving Nokia much love by not giving them an Angry Birds Space version, it signifies the challenge for Nokia. According to Bloomberg, Nomura analyst Richard Windsor said “As the standard version is already number one on the Windows Phone app store, it gives a strong indication that no one else will expect to be making money writing for this platform either.” So now that Nokia has created an awesome phone, now it just needs the apps to lure customers in to play with it.
I recently saw Rovio China’s GM, Paul Chen in Beijing. He told me that on the first day of release in China alone, there were already 500,000 downloads. With Nokia gearing up to release its new Lumia Windows range in China, Nokia and Windows really need to convince developers like Rovio of their potential and worthiness.