WIND Mobile joins Wholesale Applications Community
WIND Mobile has recently joined hands with 23 other wireless carriers from all around the world and formally announced its participation in the ‘Wholesale Applications Community‘.
The objective of this community is to take on the monopoly of Apple’s App Store by developing its own store. The community will work closely with developers to help them create applications faster and it will also offer a streamlined distribution mechanism for these apps regardless of device or carrier used.
The Community already includes an impressive list of carriers which features some of the biggest names worldwide including AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom and China Mobile. A recent press statement from the Wholesale Applications Community mentioned
“The alliance’s stated goal is to create a wholesale applications ecosystem that — from day one — will establish a simple route to market for developers to deliver the latest innovative applications and services to the widest possible base of customers around the world. In the immediate future, the alliance will seek to unite members’ developer communities and create a single, harmonized point of entry to make it easy for developers to join.”
These 24 carriers serve a customer base of 3 billion subscribers worldwide so there’s an enormous opportunity if the Community gets its moves right. A number of proprietary app stores have come up in the recent years following the instrumental success of Apple App Store. Though Apple still rules the roost as far as mobile app store is concerned – Google, Nokia and RIM are putting in huge efforts to make their app stores match up to Apple’s app store. The obvious downside to these proprietary app stores is that applications are limited to a particular manufacturer’s devices and do not run on other devices.
The novel concept of Wholesale Application Community can change the ball game of Mobile App Store and who knows – it might well spark the ‘Open Source Mobile Apps’ movement. In my opinion, these are ominous signs for the developer community. However, it will take some serious strategizing to beat the Apple App Store. Being an open source fanatic myself, I wish all community carriers ‘Good Luck’. After all, they’ll need a lot of luck (apart from the strategy) to take on the likes of Apple.
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Written by: Gaurav Kheterpal. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter,Identi.ca, or Friendfeed
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It would be great if the quality and number of apps available for the iPhone were also available for every other kind of smartphone, but the incentive for app developers just isn’t there. Most new apps are going to be free and there is little reward for creating them on other platforms.
i whant to open a wind shop in abbotsford bc can u till me what i have to do to get one shop in abbotsford bc thanks