Yes, it might be easier. But for Bears of very little brain, Ovi is what they will find. Many people will never make it out beyond that, so they won't find the apps and the devs won't reach them.

Added to which, it's not 'just a website'. The whole point of the problem is that they make sure that apps are underpinned with insurance etc. If you wanted to set up a website to sell other people's apps, you'd need either watertight disclaimers or your own insurance. Indeed, we had a long discussion about how to word the warnings and disclaimers on the extras-developers page - and that was for free software!

What Nokia is doing is not recognising that devs from here will be offering apps that have been fully tested as far as possible. Fred Bloggs writes an app: he offers it to Apple and they test it thoroughly to make sure there are no problems. Then they deduct half his price for this privilege. He offers it to Nokia and they [i]don't[i] test it: they make sure that he's got insurance in case it all goes tits up.

Apps from here will have all been tested. In fact, there's no reason why we couldn't train and accredit a bank of "app testers" to try to limit the risk. (Effectively we already have them - ourselves). That's the bit Ovi is missing. We have to show them - creating a co-op would be one way of doing that.