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Mobile firms unite to challenge Apple

Twenty-four of the world’s largest phone operators have joined forces to challenge the dominance of firms such as Apple in the mobile apps market.

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), as the group is known, made its announcement at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Its aim is to allow developers to deliver applications to all mobile phone users, “irrespective of device or technology”.

The alliance, which includes Orange, China Mobile and Verizon Wireless, has also secured support from device manufacturers LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.

Combined, the WAC group reaches 3 billion subscribers worldwide, making it by far the largest app-store initiative.

Up until now, the mobile marketplace has been fragmented in terms of both technology platforms and the individual app-stores hosted by operators. With Apple comfortably enjoying the biggest slice of the market, third-party developers have flocked to the company, creating over 140,000 applications for their app-store while largely ignoring all other stores.

“Apple has built a nice and very well-functioning castle with a direct bridge to consumers” explains Saverio Romeo, a Frost & Sullivan industry analyst. “If the rest of the industry just keeps talking about application stores and trying to walk on Apple’s bridge, they will always find Steve Jobs (Apple’s co founder and CEO) at the door of the castle”.

The Wholesale Applications Community aims to overcome this and regain its slice of the market by offering “a single, open platform that delivers applications to all mobile phone users.”

There are doubts surrounding the practicality and feasibility of the proposals, however. Andy Rubin, Google’s vice-president of engineering, doesn’t believe the companies call put it off.

“There’s always been a dream that you could write a program once and have it run anywhere and history has proven that that dream has not been fully realised and I am sceptical that it ever will be.”

Ovum analyst Tony Cripps said: “To succeed, the WAC operators will have to overcome the sometimes considerable prejudice that developers have towards operator-driven developer communities.”

The new alliance remain confident however, stating they “believe this model presents the most compelling format on the market, where developers will thrive and customers will reap the benefits of greater choice.”

The applications market has proven a highly lucrative one for mobile firms, with estimations that spending on the specialist software will hit £4bn during this year.  IT research group Garner has estimated that downloads will have generated in excess of £19bn in revenue by 2013.