Wholesale App Community
Deploying and publishing mobile or Smartphone applications today though well understood is still unchartered territory. To some degree, for app developers, getting their application published is much more time consuming than building the app itself. With the success of the Apple’s App Store, many Smartphone companies joined the bandwagon to make their own app store’s copy cat. RIM has BlackBerry App World, HTC has Market, Nokia has Ovi, Android has Android App Market, Samsung has Samsung Application Store, Microsoft has Windows Marketplace, and many more app stores from enthusiast web sites and mobile network operators. Though the app store was started in the Palm and Handspring PDA market, Apple made it a popular and amazingly profitable venture. Gartner’s latest report on app sales indicated that Apple’s App Store garnered 99.4% of mobile app sales in 2009. Likely taking most of the 4.2 billion dollars spent on mobile apps that year. That was confirmed by Apple’s latest announcement of sales to top 3 billion dollars. This is serious business. Something that mobile network operators missed and definitely noticed.
In the week of Mobile World Congress, mobile network operators made an effort by joining hands to create their own unified app store. They called it Wholesale App Community. I’m not a big fan of the name but nevertheless, I like this new development as this is such a good news for the developers’ community. A single app store to deploy your app is a nirvana for developers but will probably never happen but at least publishing an app to an app store that has a wider reach is a good start. There are currently 20 participating mobile network operators on this consortium to include the world’s leading. We’re talking about the likes of AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, Orange and China Mobile. Virtually, the consortium covers the globe and I expect many more joins as it becomes popular. Hopefully, these guys will do it right. Right in the sense of building a solid software foundation that does not limit developers but empowers them. With a possible boost on network operators’ bottom line, I expect them to work on this fast.
For developers out there, you can get more details on Wholesale App Community from their web site at http://wholesaleappcommunity.com/.
