The Ovi Store
The Ovi Store is the application marketplace Nokia operated for the Maemo platform, and on the N900 it shipped as a preinstalled client that bought, downloaded and installed third-party software on the device's 1.1 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage. Maemo is the Debian-based Linux system Nokia built for its internet tablets, and the store was its official commercial channel from 2009 until Nokia closed it for Maemo devices in 2011. This page is an independent reference. It is not Nokia, not Jolla, not maemo.org and not the original Maemo Freak blog, and it hosts no firmware, no ROMs and no repackaged applications.
The N900 is the device this page is about, and the store's story is really the story of what that phone could run and what it could not. It was also the bridge between 2 platforms that are often mixed up. Maemo did not become Sailfish OS, but the commercial line continued: Jolla's store for Sailfish OS replaced Ovi for the successor hardware, and an Android app on an N900 was a ported program, not a second operating system. The N900 itself stayed on Maemo 5, with Fremantle as its final official release, and nothing newer ever arrived for it. That single fact answers most of the search traffic this page sees: the N900 never got Sailfish OS, and it never ran Android as a system.
What you could actually install
What you could actually install in the Ovi Store fell into 4 categories: paid games, free apps, widgets and developer tools. The N900's screen measured 240 x 400 pixels in portrait and 400 x 240 in landscape, and nearly every store entry was built for that exact size. Prices were listed in euros, a typical paid app cost between 0.80 and 3.99 euros, and the premium tier reached 5.99 euros. The 2 largest categories were games and social clients, and the store carried roughly 1,000 listings across all 4 categories at its peak. Anything you bought stayed installed after the closure, because the N900 stored apps on its own flash and never needed a re-download.
How the N900 got its software
How the N900 got its software ran through 3 channels, and the Ovi Store was only the official one. The store handled paid content and the curated free listings. The Maemo repositories, the community archives at repository.maemo.org, carried the rest of the ecosystem, from the Gwibber social client to the most popular camera tools. And sideloading through the device manager let any user install a .deb file straight from a USB stick or an SD card, which is how most enthusiast tools, such as custom kernels and camera enhancements, reached the device. All 3 channels shared the same Debian package system underneath, so an app installed by any method updated the same way through the same 2 lines of the apt pipeline.
Maps and navigation on the N900
Maps and navigation on the N900 came from 3 sources, and only 1 of them lived in the Ovi Store. Nokia Maps, the preinstalled client, used the Ovi account for traffic data and offline map packs, and a single country's offline download took roughly 1 GB. OpenStreetMap arrived through community clients, which fetched tiles from the OSM servers and cached them on the SD card. And the N900's 3G modem, which reached 21 Mbps on a suitable network, kept the online clients usable on the move. Navigation was therefore a split ecosystem: the store sold the premium maps, the repositories supplied the open alternatives, and the hardware did the rest.
What the N900 did not get
What the N900 did not get was any upgrade path beyond Maemo 5, and that absence shapes most of the searches this page receives. The phone launched in 2009, Fremantle 1.2011.10-6 was its last official release in 2011, and no newer Maemo version ever targeted the device. Android, the most-asked-about platform, arrived only as the app port: the Qt-Android toolchain recompiled programs for the Android runtime, so an Android app on an N900 was a Maemo program wearing a different framework. And a Sailfish OS download, in the form of a Jolla ISO image, fits Jolla's own devices, not the N900, whose kernel and driver stack are not the same. The honest answer to each of those searches is the same: the N900 stays on Maemo 5, and the successors live elsewhere.
The end of the store and what replaced it
The end of the Ovi Store for the N900 came in 2 stages, and the replacement arrived through Jolla, the company that carried the platform lineage forward. Nokia announced the closure of Ovi Store for Maemo in 2011 and stopped selling new listings shortly after, which left existing customers with their purchases but without new inventory. Jolla's Jolla Store then opened with the first Jolla phone in 2013 and sold apps for early Sailfish OS releases, and the Aegis Store, which opened in 2023, now serves the current Sailfish OS 4 line. The 3 stores form one unbroken commercial line: Ovi for Maemo, the Jolla Store for the transition years, Aegis for today. The N900 sits at the start of that line, and the Maemo repositories, which kept running through all 3 eras, are the thread that connects them.