Mobile Operators Fight App Store Fragmentation

angry tapir writes "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 Wholesale Applications Community members include: AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Telefónica, Telenor Group, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, and Vodafone." The vision seems to be eventually to create one unified app market in addition to Google's and Apple's. The article quotes an analyst noting that the mobile operators have "a poor track record with this type of industry consortium."

Comments

Do they have a choice?

[pspahn]

It's clearly Apple vs. Google vs. Everyone else as it is. A couple of computer companies came up with novel and interesting ways to sell software on phones and now you have all the phone companies freaking out trying to figure out how to do the same thing and still compete.

Their business is telephones, not software. There really isn't any other choice the telecoms have. They know they'll be more effective working together and pooling talent, but will they deliver? I'm sure most people doubt their ability to come up with an answer, but you never know...

Re:Why do we need an app store at all?

[iluvcapra]

Palm and Winmo supported downloadable apps forever, they just didn't move. Vendors were fighting rampant piracy, end users often didn't know what was available except through rumor, and stuff that you could download frankly sucked half the time.

The store concept is the killer app that makes the whole third-party app concept worth the phone OS vendor's time. I remember having innumerable problems keeping my the various junk on my Treo 650 working and compatible, and migrating from one phone to another while keeping app vendors serial numbers entered. I also remember downloading lots of different PRCs and them not working for my OS revision, or phone model, or carrier firmware. It was a mess, and the app store concept is a solution. They just took the concept of a package manager and put a credit card slot on it.