Apple Simplicity vs. Nokia Complexity

Everyone loves Apple's AAPL App Store. Even people who go the Google GOOG route and buy an Android phone still wish they had access to the official App Store. Thus, if you're going to compete with Apple and design a new mobile store for games and applications, you would obviously look to Steve Jobs for inspiration. Or would you? Maybe it would be better to follow Nokia's NOK lead and make the system as complex as possible: “Part of our deal is that we will take the lead on the apps store,” Jo Harlow, Nokia's head of smart devices, told Forbes this morning. “Microsoft's Windows Marketplace will be providing the backend. The Marketplace will continue to exist, though. We will have separate stores. “The idea with the Nokia app store is to be able to publish from one place to multiple platforms. We will let developers publish to other Nokia platforms, other Windows Phone manufacturers and other Microsoft platforms. There could also be an operator store that would act like a store within a store.” Business Insider sums this up quite nicely: “Got that? Us neither.” Of course, Business Insider also notes that Nokia has one big advantage: scale. The publication also reports that there are still a lot of “good reasons” for developers to work with Nokia.