On February 15, 2010, Twenty-four of the world’s leading mobile operators, including Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Vodafone, Orange and O2, released a joint statement announcing the formation of the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) in the Mobile World Conference held in Barcelona. (Tara, 2010) Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG are also believed to support this initiative. According the announcement, the WAC is an open technology platform designed to deliver applications to all mobile-phone users. With this platform, mobile application developers no longer need to take care which mobile phone would be the best choice for them to develop applications and gain profits. Consumers will not be upset due to incompatible applications with their phones.
As we know that Apple has dominated the mobile application market, since it launched iPhone and app store in 2008. Over three billion apps have been downloaded to iPhone in just 18 months, but mobile operators share little benefit in the booming of Apple apps download. (Wikipedia, 2010) Apple’s rivals such as Palm, Google and Microsoft have also already moved to tap into the applications market. Now the mobile operators take their first step to take a slice of the mobile applications market.
The idea of uniting mobile platforms is appealing, but few analysts are convinced their work will succeed. The biggest challenge comes from the integration of existing industry initiatives. Currently, handset hardware and software are so diverse that developing apps that function across multiple hardware platforms poses quite a challenge for developers. They need to learn different languages and hardware architectures to implement their apps on different mobile handsets. Basically, all these existing hardware and software are incompatible and almost have no way to unite them. Therefore, maybe the only way for this alliance is to set up a new platform standard, which makes handset makers to follow it to build their future products.
Another issue is the security risk bringing by such an open technology platform. Apple gains its credit from consumers by its good censorship on the submitted applications. Apple screens each submission to meet strict security and content criterions before it’s formally introduced into the store. This ensures keeping consumers from downloading shaky applications and opening security holes on their handsets.
Although the actual plan for WAC is not clear right now and most consumers and developers are only watching how it is going to be, this initiative still makes an impact on the mobile industry. After all, these mobile operators have the power to reach their almost 2 billion mobile subscribers. If this initiative succeeds, Apple would lose its leading in the mobile application market.
References
Tara, (2010,February, 17). Mobile World Conference: WAC Proposes AT&T ,Verizon ,Spring Global App Store. Retrieved Mar.5 from http://sparxoo.com/2010/02/17/mobile-world-conference-wac-proposes-att-verizon-sprint-global-app-store/
Wikipedia, (2010. March, 06). App Store. Retrieved Mar.7 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store#Milestones
verasays said
Interesting post! The plan sounds ambitious, yet it might be very hard for 24 companies to cooperate with each other in the future. Although they are planning to work hard on WAC, will they keep developing on their own platforms? The whole plan sounds reasonable because open is always the right direction to go in related technology industry now. Maybe the core difference will depend on what business model they will build up and what markets they are going to enter (for example, they may earn market share sooner in areas where smartphone are not standing out enough).