Posts tagged iPhone

It is the sacred union anti-Apple. Twenty-four mobile operators among the largest world, including AT & T, Orange, Vodafone, Telefónica and NTT DoCoMo, often competitors in some markets, announced Monday the creation of a broad alliance, the “Wholesale Applications Community. This “community to a wholesale market applications” should give rise to an open platform for joint developers of mobile applications. In recent months, traders had worked independently of each other to start their own online shops for mobile applications.

In both shaken and impressed by the success of the App Store from Apple, they try to retake control of a market still nascent but promised an explosion and they fear being rejected. Indeed, the operators do not touch a penny of their applications downloaded by subscribers with an iPhone. Apple keeps 30% and reverse developers 70% of revenues generated by the purchase applications from its App Store site, which has passed the 3 billion downloads in January.

The global market for mobile applications is estimated at around 3 billion euros. There should at least fivefold in four years. More than 140,000 applications are available on the App Store, as developers scramble to appear on the site that addresses the wider public. By comparison, shop online Android Market for phones running the operating system from Google, Android, only about 25,000 applications.

The 24 operators together, representing over 3 billion mobile subscribers worldwide, a total of approximately 4.5 billion, give themselves a year to set a common standard. This is not the first time that operators are working together.

The goal this time is really to create a “single point of entry, harmonized” Developer “regardless of the type of device or technology,” says the alliance. The members even claim they have “unify their communities of developers, which will not be easy. Vodafone held in Barcelona on Monday a conference with developers for its platform application called “360″. The claim to “an open ecosystem emerge” this goes not to let Apple dictate to the world of developers. The operators, who hope to recover this revenue stream, say their approach is in the interest of all, “developers, network operators and mobile users themselves.” Three major phone manufacturers have joined this initiative, Samsung, the world number two, LG, number three, and Sony Ericsson, the fourth. Nokia, which grows its own store online content and applications Ovi Store does not it is attached and for good reason: it has announced a strategic partnership with Intel.