Apple’s astonishing success in building a proprietary app platform with more than 140,000 iPhone applications has inspired other mobile operators to think about the lucrative business of phone apps. But in order to begin battling Apple’s incredible popularity, twenty-four mobile operators have decided to take the opposite approach to Apple’s proprietary platform: an open source app platform that will deliver apps to all cell phone users. The mobile operators announced the news today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Today’s press release about the Wholesale Applications Community described the group’s goals as follows:
The alliance’s stated goal is to create a wholesale applications ecosystem that — from day one — will establish a simple route to market for developers to deliver the latest innovative applications and services to the widest possible base of customers around the world. In the immediate future the alliance will seek to unite members’ developer communities and create a single, harmonised point of entry to make it easy for developers to join.
The big names in the new alliance include America Movil, AT&T, Bharti Airtel, China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, KT, mobilkom austria group, MTN Group, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Orascom Telecom, Softbank Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Telenor Group, TeliaSonera, SingTel, SK Telecom, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, VimpelCom, Vodafone and Wind. The list also includes three of the biggest mobile phone device makers — LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. Check out Andy Abramson’s interesting post on who’s not included in this list.
Despite the excitement of this new turn of events, with the possibility of uniting a previously fragmented market through an open-source platform, TechCrunch just posted a not too optimistic take on the Wholesale Applications Community. The article lists potential problems such as fragmentation, WAC program updates, and the tradeoff between horsepower and compatibility. On a final note, TechCrunch argues that if “each of these competing mobile platforms had 100 really good applications that covered the most popular use-cases, they’d probably be a lot better off than having a hundred thousand apps that work decently well.” Let’s stay tuned to see how the quality of the new open source apps turn out.
Read more about the Wholesale Applications Community on Reuters, mobilebusinessbriefing, ZDnet, TimesOnline, and BusinessInsider.
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