“Twenty-four mobile network operators have formed the Wholesale Applications Community to avoid fragmenting the apps market and to give developers one point of entry to all the members, the GSM Association announced on Monday. The operators will now start working on uniting their existing developer communities, so developers will be able to go to one place to get their applications distributed instead of having to go through multiple application approval processes. The community will also start working on a common development standard that should be ready within the next 12 months. The standard will be independent of phone type and operating system, according to the members.”
[quote]The community will also start working on a common development standard that should be ready within the next 12 months. The standard will be independent of phone type and operating system, according to the members.[/quote]
So in other words, some flavor of Java I am guessing. Either that or the Qualcomm-license-encumbered BREW….
Are these the same telco companies that charge 25c per SMS, encouraged a Walled Garden approach with previous mobile software (locked to Telco platform), and after several decades of a monopoly status generally allowed a newcomer to the telephone business and mop the floor with their lazy asses in less than 24 months. The big telcos are dinosaurs when it comes to content / innovation, the only thing they have at this point in time is an expensive backbone which upstarts cannot provide without a ridiculous amount of start up money. These guys have only just now gotten together, it will take over 24 months until they even agree on what standards to pursue, and another 24 months until they actually deliver. And even if they can pull this off, they’ll still only offer a subset of the iPhone capabilities (apps and hardware).
Too little, too late.
They just want a piece of the appstore pie that apple created.
We will probably see one more piece of news about this when it launches, then never hear from it again.
Apple did not create the pie. They want to eat more of the pie they created.
I don’t think they’re targeting smartphones. Smartphones already have their own development platforms and their own app-stores by and large. If smartphones incidentally give some business to this new app-store, I’m sure the operators won’t mind, but I think the only logical target for such an endeavor is feature phones.
If they do go with something Java-based, as I predict they will, I think the outlook is decent, since Sun (now Oracle) has already been doing a lot of work (corraling the phone manufacturers when necessary) to repair the compatibility mess that is/was J2ME. For instance, the Light Weight UI Toolkit makes it pretty easy to create very nice-looking apps that work across most phones. In practice, it has been possible for quite a while to target tons of phones with just one Java app–this new app-store will probably just centralize the app repository and maybe specify a unified set of APIs and a test suite for app acceptance. Since the tech’s already mostly there, I don’t think it will take much more than a year.
Assuming my assumptions are correct
, the question is more for how many more years the feature-phone market will be a prime target? I give it 5 in well-off countries, 10 everywhere else….
25c per SMS? Where do you live? in the US? The world is not the US and AT&T man.
Edited 2010-02-17 13:16 UTC
Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that they will settle on a platform that has to do with cross-platform Adobe AIR?
Sure, there will be lots of app stores around for the next years as a “new” market for mobile phones emerges.
I think many of them will go away after these years. This is just an evolution in distribution of software on the mobile platform. Consumers may benefit from it, but in time. Not all can win or survive.
The app stores have been there since a decade or more. They are merging their app stores because it makes sense. There is nothing “new” about it. The app store is not something that was invented last year.
All these carriers and how many developers?