Does anyone smell smoke? It appears that 24 of the world’s largest mobile operators do, and they are teaming up to save their smoldering app stores and markets since Apple blazed its way through. The operators’ initiative, known as the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), wants to form a single, open-platform for developers. If the operators open up the app platform across all of their markets and handsets, it will cover more than 3 billion customers.
WAC members include companies like Verizon Wireless, China Mobile, Vodafone, AT&T, Orange, O2 and Sprint. WAC looks to be the most coordinated attempt so far by operators to grab more of the mobile applications market ‘ a market that none could really entice users to enter before Apple made the scene.
Apple is by far the strongest player in the applications sector, with roughly 157,000 apps ready for download right now. Business has been good for Apple, which takes a 30% cut of all the paid applications. It has delivered more than 3 billion apps to consumers, though most of these were free.
What gives WAC an interesting position in this market is that it’s a community mainly of network operators, which means that Orange and Vodafone are courting developers instead of Google and Microsoft. WAC also has support from phone makers like LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.
This would give the developers’ apps more of a reach and would cut some costs for multiple platform development. It also means, however, that their apps might only work on a few mobiles running each system, instead of all smartphones running an operating system like the new Windows Phone 7. Phone-maker support gives a little more hope that the mobiles will at least be able to handle the hardware demands of apps, but it has a lot of software platforms to cover.
WAC’s platform will be initially based on JIL and BONDI, Web based widget specifications. This shows that WAC sees the Web as the best shot for full compatibility ‘ a very smart move, thanks to all these 3G and 4G networks around the globe. The problem here is that JIL and BONDI were supposed to already be compatible industry wide for smartphones, and so far, they aren’t.
The move is the latest attempt by cellcos to prevent themselves from being designated as billing platforms and a dumb-network of towers. CNN’s Doug Gross said, ‘Systems like Google’s Android have been more open, but the project by the mobile companies will be the biggest push yet to lure developers away from official outlets to a third-party distributor of apps.’ The problem lies in convincing anyone that a single app platform can overcome the problems of implementing anything across the entire mobile sector, especially when considering areas like mobile payments.
Andy Rubin, Google’s VP of engineering and one of the main people in charge of Android, told The Washington Post, ‘There is always a dream that you could write a program once and have it run anywhere, and history has proven that that dream has not been fully realized. And I am skeptical that it ever will be.’ Support for this is also hard to gauge as more news rolls out from this year’s Mobile World Congress where Ericsson just jumped into the fray, launching its own platform. However, its new eStore is for operators, and it wants them to have a spate of apps to pick from and offer through their own packages. It sounds like a scaled-down version of WAC which aims to provide multiple versions of apps for different operating systems instead of one fully-compatible app. It sounds a bit more feasible.
Ericsson hopes to enable a private-label marketplace for operators to easily tap in order to offer end users a carrier-branded marketplace. The problem is that mobile operators don’t have a good track record with developers, and many say they’re reluctant to jump in with such groups.
Operators seek to invest a lot of time and money in a market that will only reach one in five mobiles at best, and that’s if the app store works for every single smartphone out there. Toss in the iPhone, BlackBerry and other existing, popular smartphones, and that percentage keeps shrinking quickly.
After that, cellcos will have to persuade users that these third-party sites are safe and worth visiting. On blogs and articles coming from very industry-centric sources to general news sites like CNN, myriad concerns are expressed ‘ most notably those over security risks.
One reason that Apple’s store is considered so safe is that, love it or hate it, it’s not an open system. Apps need approval; apps get pulled; creators can get banned; content rules get continually updated; and, perhaps most importantly, new rules get implemented across the entire platform all at once.
Apple may shield users from some legitimate apps it has a distaste for, but it shields users from far more scams and hacks. It feels like a last-ditch effort coming long before the real end.