The Ovi Store
The Ovi Store reached the Nokia N900 in 2010, roughly six months after the device went on sale, arriving as a client application in a Nokia firmware update and sitting alongside the Extras package repositories that Maemo had used since the internet tablets; Nokia’s storefront was renamed Nokia Store in 2011 and closed under Microsoft in 2015.
What the Ovi Store was
The Ovi Store was Nokia’s own application storefront, launched in 2009 for its Symbian and Series 40 phones and extended to Maemo when the client came to the N900. Ovi was the umbrella brand Nokia put over its consumer services, covering maps, mail, music and the store, and it is the reason so much software of that period carries a name that means nothing now. The store worked the way every storefront of the period worked: a signed catalogue, a vendor account, one channel in and one channel out, with Nokia deciding what appeared in it. That was an ordinary arrangement on Symbian. On a Debian based Linux system it was the unusual one, because the platform already had a complete way of installing software and had had it for years.
How the store reached the N900
The store reached the N900 as part of Nokia’s firmware programme rather than as something an owner went and fetched. The device shipped in November 2009 with no storefront at all, and the Ovi Store client arrived during 2010 in a system update, which is the point at which the archived news coverage on this domain describes it as having gone live for the device. Nokia issued three significant updates for Maemo 5 over the device’s supported life, the last of them in 2010, and after that the platform’s software supply was entirely a community matter. The Nokia N900 is unusual among phones of its generation in that the end of vendor updates did not end the flow of software to it.
What the store actually carried
The store actually carried far less for Maemo than it did for Symbian, and the reason is arithmetic rather than opinion: Nokia sold Symbian devices in the tens of millions and the N900 in a fraction of that, so almost no commercial developer built for Maemo first. The Maemo catalogue was mostly games and a small number of branded applications. Firefox for Maemo, Mozilla’s build of the browser for the platform, was one of the titles that appeared there with a promotional campaign around it, and games such as the Bounce series were the sort of thing that filled the front page. Nothing in the catalogue was necessary. Everything in it had an equivalent, usually a better one, a repository away.
This site does not distribute software. The Ovi Store client, the packages it delivered and the Maemo firmware are all gone from the vendor infrastructure that served them, and nothing here replaces any of it. This is an independent reference, not Nokia, not Jolla, not maemo.org and not the blog that reported these events at the time.
How the store differed from the Maemo repositories
| Attribute | Ovi Store | Extras repositories |
|---|---|---|
| Mechanism | Storefront client with a Nokia account | APT repositories read by the Application Manager |
| Package format | Delivered through the store client | Standard Debian packages |
| Gatekeeper | Nokia | Community testing and promotion between catalogues |
| Catalogue depth on Maemo | Mostly games and a few branded titles | Thousands of packages, including ports of desktop software |
| Available on the N900 from | 2010, with a firmware update | November 2009, at launch |
| Status | Closed in 2015 | Community mirrors of the archives survive |
The difference between the store and the repositories is the difference between a shop and a distribution. Extras, Extras-testing and Extras-devel were three catalogues with a promotion path between them: a developer uploaded to devel, packages moved to testing, and community testers voted them into Extras proper once they were judged safe for ordinary users. That arrangement is set out in detail under The Maemo repositories, and it is the mechanism behind almost everything worth having on the device, from the mapping software described under Maps and navigation to the terminal, the desktop widgets and the browser ports. A survey of the result is under What you could actually install.
Why the store never became the main channel
The store never became the main channel on Maemo for three reasons, and none of them is that the store was badly built. First, it arrived late, into a platform whose users had already learned the Application Manager and had no reason to learn a second thing. Second, it could not carry the software those users actually wanted, because a curated commercial catalogue cannot contain a port of a desktop video player or a packet sniffer or a terminal emulator. Third, the audience was small and technical, and a small technical audience is exactly the audience least in need of a curated shop. The result was that the Ovi Store on the N900 was a feature people noted and then largely ignored, which is a fair description of most of what Nokia added to the platform after launch.
The end of the store
The end of the store came in stages rather than in one announcement. Nokia retired the Ovi brand in 2011 and the storefront became Nokia Store. Microsoft acquired Nokia’s devices and services business in 2014, and the remaining Nokia Store operation was wound down in 2015, five years after the client had reached the N900 and four years after the platform it belonged to had been abandoned in favour of Windows Phone. When a storefront closes, the software it sold stops being obtainable, which is the structural argument against storefronts that the Maemo community had been making since before the store existed. The Extras archives, being ordinary Debian repositories, could be and were mirrored.
What replaced it in the lineage
What replaced it in the lineage is Jolla’s arrangement for Sailfish OS, and it looks much more like Maemo’s than like Nokia’s. Sailfish OS is the descendant of this platform by way of MeeGo, built by a company founded in 2011 by people who had worked on it at Nokia, first shipped on a phone in 2013 and still shipping. Its official application catalogue, Harbour, is curated in the way a storefront is, and alongside it sits a community repository service where developers publish what the curated catalogue will not take, which is precisely the Extras pattern under a different name. Sailfish is a Linux system rather than an Android one, and it runs some Android applications through a separate compatibility layer rather than by being Android underneath. Jolla distributes the operating system itself and licenses it commercially; nothing of that kind is hosted here, and this page describes the arrangement rather than providing it.