"There has been a 1,000 per cent increase in mobile application downloads by Indians and we have seen a 1,400 per cent increase in downloads of mobile applications made by developers in India," Nokia India Managing Director P Balaji said here, without providing figures.
Nokia has started a contest for application developers, the second round for its Lumia platform, and expects to get 50,000 new ideas that can be converted into mobile applications, or software designed to run on smartphones.
"In the last contest, we got 38,000 ideas, out of which 1,200 have been converted into applications...We will add 300 more by February," Balaji said.
Balaji said Nokia plans to announce partnerships with Indian telecom operators to charge purchases of applications to the bills or pre-paid accounts of customers instead of requiring payments to be made with credit or debit cards.