There has been some buzz yesterday about 24 of the worlds mobile phone carriers announcing that they will create their own app store (Wholesale Applications Community). We’ve known for a while that they are upset about being cut out of the revenue from app stores. My daughter as an example spends $20/month on iTunes. I know others who do the same. The phone companies definitely want to find a way to get in on the game.

Here is the announcement….

http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.com/article/mobile-operators-unite-on-global-apps-platform-

Now, the 1st question that I had was how would this fit in with my iphone which already has an app store (and a very good one I might add)? Will I have two app stores? The same can be said for anyone with a high end phone from Nokia, Microsoft, RIM or Palm.

If you look at the API used to create apps for this new app store, they are based on the BONDI APIs (http://bondi.omtp.org/). Apps are more like HTML widgets that can access the phone features (like GPS and address book, etc). Now to be really cross-platform means that we are talking about lowest common denominator so this is not HTML 5. In fact, the current engine (on the BONDI site) runs on Windows Mobile.

And this leads me to where I believe this app store will initially exist… on low-end feature phones. Sure it might be possible to run one of these apps on an iphone but why would I when there is probably a native app that is much better. This begs the question as to why the carriers want to have an app store for feature phones. The first part of that is that its the only game in town left. Here in North American that doesn’t look very exciting but in Asia its common for feature phones to have apps. And the carriers charge for them. In India, I saw feature phones where you could get your horoscope for 2Rs ($0.08) or check the cricket scores. And in India feature phones still rules as most people can’t afford a $600 for a (unsubsidized) phone when they make $300 a year. And remember India is a country with 350M mobile phones (and growing quickly).

And the second reason that the mobile carriers might want to do this is that eventually, HTML 5 will allow apps to be created that are as rich as native apps. At that time, a carrier app store might be able to take on a handset app store. As a developer, I would love to create one app that works on more than one type of handset.

So unless you have the ability to sell your apps in Asia (or Africa, etc), today’s announcement is not something that an app developer need to rush out and play with. But we should keep an eye on it. If the carriers don’t mess this app store up and HTML 5 does turn out to be what we hope it will be, maybe we’ll be very happy to develop for it in the future.