Offscreen reaches 100 million downloads

If you’ve carried around a Nokia phone over the last few years, the chances are that an app or game from Offscreen Technologies has been part of your toolkit.
Well known for their polished and sublimely useful apps such as Grid Touch and Converter Touch, Offscreen are the latest developer to reach the milestone of 100 million downloads from the Nokia Store.

We caught up with Offscreen’s CEO, Harri Myllynen, to find out how they did it.

First of all, who is Offscreen?

Offscreen is based in Helsinki, Finland, and was founded by the core team in 2005, when we saw great opportunities in developing software for the early Nokia smartphones at the time.

We’re still a pretty small company, employing 20 people, most of whom are programmers.

While we make money from our apps, our main line of business has been developing bespoke apps for clients.  Our success in Nokia store has proven to be a great way to promote our company and market our skills to potential clients.

We’ve noticed that Offscreen apps have a very distinctive look. What are the ingredients of this?

We believe in simplicity, polish and common non-textual widgets.

By simplicity, I mean reducing the number of menus and screens to an absolute minimum, preferably to just one. Polish comes out through professional design and putting real life materials and elements into our apps. Non-textual widgets in turn are common symbols used for similar tasks (info, close box etc.) which minimize the need for localization.

So which of your apps have been the biggest hits in the Nokia Store?

In terms of downloads the most successful apps have been the simplest – in our opinion, what comes to app design, less is absolutely more!

Just think “Bright Lite” torch app which is basically a realistic light switch turning the camera led on and off, or “Candle Touch” which is a candle simulation with simple and realistic interaction.

Basically, the easier it is to understand an app, the more likely it is to be downloaded.

And what would you say were the golden rules for up-and-coming developers?

To be successful in the apps space, you should always aim to be the first with a given concept in any ecosystem.

Novelty, in turn, gets noticed by the bloggers who spread the word and drive downloads – much more efficiently than any paid marketing would do.

You’re well-known for your Symbian apps, but you’re also moving into both Series 40 and Windows Phone territory. How have you found that transition?

It’s been relatively easy. Perhaps because we do full canvas touch apps with our custom widgets only.

Different screen resolutions sometimes call for changes in the layout, but usually we just rescale graphics for the new platform.

And because of our Origo cross compiling tools we have been able to port apps between platforms in a factory setting, by which I mean deploying several apps simultaneously.

Thank you, Harri, for your time and congratulations on a great achievement!