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Feb. 15, 2010

AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and more than twenty other telcos and mobile service providers have teamed up to create a big mobile apps store that the companies say will rival Apple's and those of other smartphone makers.

The project has been in various planning stages for many weeks, but it's only today that AT&T and Verizon are making the news public.

The group of more than 25 companies have formed what they're calling the Wholesale Applications Community, they announced today at the GSM World conference in Barcelona, Spain.

The mobile apps store will be designed to encourage application developers to create wireless and online applications for all smartphones and operating systems, according to a written release from the GSM (Global System for Mobile) Association, which hosts the trade show.

Not to be left out, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC and LG Electronics are also part of the group.

The companies said their new website will give mobile app developers a simpler method in publishing and marketing their apps, and will soon offer smartphone customers new apps quicker and a wider selection than anyone else.

The group will create an open source platform, but not all apps will be free, however.

"For wireless users this means a much broader choice of innovative applications and mobile services available and on a broader choice of devices than ever before," the group said on its site, which was now officially online early this morning.

In the past, some apps developers have complained that Apple is sometimes slow to approve their work, and/or it categorically rejected some of their apps for what they call "arbitrary or confusing" reasons.

Understandably, mobile apps developers and now increasingly impatient and irritated and they wish to change that.

Robert Conway, CEO of the GSM Association says "this is exciting news for the wireless industry and will serve to speed and greatly improve the development of a broader range of innovative, cross-device, cross-operator mobile apps than ever before."

Until today, Apple has had control over all apps that run on its iPhones, and offering them only through the company's official online store, "The Apple Store".

To be fair, operating systems such as Google's Android have been more open, but the project by these 25 mobile companies will be the biggest initiative yet to attract mobile apps developers, in an effort to steer them away from official outlets.

Other companies that are international in nature and that will participate in the group include China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone and Wind.

The consortium of mobile companies says that, when combined, they have access to more than three billion wireless customers globally.

And now, understandably, they all want a piece of the rapidly growing pie.

Last month, Apple said that its iPhone App Store surpassed 3 billion downloads from both iPhone as well as iPod touch users.

Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO says "a little over 3 billion mobile applications downloaded in less than 18 months: this is like nothing we've ever seen before. The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users a great experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon."

Overall, the pace of downloads has grown exponentially. Apple announced on April 23, 2009, that its app store surpassed 1 billion downloads, and it reached 2 billion downloads on Sept. 28 of that year.

Apple's App Store has more than 100,000 apps for download, far surpassing other competitors' stores.

In December, Google said that there are more than 16,000 apps available for Android phones at the Google App Store, and there are only a few thousand available for Research In Motion's (RIM) BlackBerrys, Microsoft's Windows Mobile devices and Palm's WebOS smartphones.

Though most App Store downloads are associated with the iPhone, the number of app downloads from iPod touch users have been growing recently. Late last month, App Store downloads on the iPod touch exceeded the iPhone's for the first time, eclipsing iPhone downloads by well over 170 percent, according to a study by mobile analysis firm Flurry Analytics.

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Source: AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint.