Mobile service providers joing together to create standard for mobile phone apps

15. Feb, 2010 0 Comments

The mobile phone app market is a lucrative one and as such 24 of the largest phone operators have joined together the challenge the dominance of app stores, such as Apple’s app store. The operators including Vodafone, China Mobile and Sprint have access to over 3 billion customers and want to regain control of the apps available on phones.

Downloads are predicted to top the 21 billion by 2013 and in a market dominated by Apple the phone operators are keen to get in on the action. Apple downloads were more than 3 billion in the last 18 months. Blackberry, Google, Nokia, Symbian and Microsoft all offer their own app stores as well.

As a result of these different phone manufacturers all competing developers of apps often have to create multiple versions of the same app for different stores. The Wholesale Applications Community aims to overcome this by offering a single open platform that delivers applications to all mobile phone users independent of the phone.

This work is also supported by some of the hardware manufacturers such as LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, as well as industry body the GSM association. Another firm echoing the new idea are Adobe. Their AIR platform, which is available on desktops, allows developers to build desktop applications for services that are more commonly found on Google’s Android browser. Adobe will be offering the AIR platform on Google’s Android operating system and until now it has been unavailable on smart phones. This may change if all apps have to conform to the same developer standard.