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>For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc.

I remember they were giving Lumia 925's to computer engineering students here years ago if they made and uploaded an app. You can imagine the quality of the apps they were uploading. Most of them were slideshows or just a wall of text.

That's not how you incentivise app developers, that's how you inflate your numbers.

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Back in the day the number of apps in the store was a major point in the mobile OS wars, though. Google and Nokia were both constantly compared to Apple and told how they need to improve.

And yes, one response was to inflate numbers with random crap. Nokia created a developer tool to convert web pages to native apps -- basically just a webview wrapper with bundled web content. Ovi Store was half full of these "apps".

I remember a co-worker who would scan the latest IOS apps and then install them and demonstrate them at lunch for us. One day he was really happy with his latest download: A "softserve poop" app. The other one was a "virtual bong hit" app.

But yeah, lots of bloatware and apps that were worthless, but could hold your attention for a few minutes until you uninstalled it.

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