Mobile Operators Join to Develop Standard Apps

Apple have got under the skin of mobile comms providers as twenty four of the largest phone operators announce their joint project known as the Wholesale Applications Community, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.

The main idea being that together they can challenge the dominance of particular mobile app stores. It’s reported that the new alliance, which includes Vodafone, China Mobile and Sprint, has access to more than three billion customers in total.

Analysts at Gartner have predicted that spending on the specialist pieces of software will hit $6.2bn (£4bn) this year with the number of downloads rising to 4.5 billion from 2.5 billion last year. It predicts that downloads will top 21 billion by 2013, yielding almost $30bn.

Given the variety of different apps available on the current market, developers often have to create different versions of apps and go through separate approval processes for each individual store. This new initiative aims to develop a common standard for applications over the next 12 months.

Published 15/02/2010