Apple ambushed in Barcelona
(Rest of Mobile) world tries to storm App Store
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MWC The mobile industry - most of it - has finally got its act together to challenge Apple's dominance of mobile applications.
The "Wholesale Applications Community" can certainly claim wide support - three handset makers, LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, along with dozens of carriers and operators including China Telecom, AT&T, Orange and Vodafone. It is expecting more members in coming weeks.
The group, which claims three billion customers, wants to create a single market place for mobile applications regardless of what platform they run on.
In the longer term the WAC is seeking to create standards to ensure that apps will run on all platforms, it is being supported by the GSMA. It said it would rely on existing standards rather than trying to create new standards.
By making life easier for developers, the community hopes users will benefit from lots more working mobile applications.
Apple has dominated mobile applications thanks to its App Store, which has a less than transparent process for approving apps. If developers don't fit Apple's unspoken laws, they can forget tapping into the lucrative iPhone (and iPad?) market, except for those customers foolhardy enough to jailbreak their handsets.
Whether WAC can really offer an alternative. Operators, and handset makers, have hardly covered themselves in glory with their previous individual efforts to create app warehouses and communities of users. If they haven't been trying to undermine one another, they've usually embarrassed themselves with pathetic attempts to get down with the kids they imagine are the main market for mobile phone apps.
WAC's website is here. ®
COMMENTS
Colly Myers is a good chap...
...but he's talking bollocks here. Java ME isn't the problem: it's the panoply of hardware variations and user interfaces which cause the difficulties.
Porting C or C++ code isn't difficult—both languages are no less portable than Java. Java's only claim to fame is its VM, but this isn't anywhere near as useful as some way of porting a GUI from, say, a multi-touch Nokia to a more traditional candy-bar device with a smaller (non-touch) display that runs at a different aspect ratio.
THAT is the problem with a single, unified "app store" for all mobiles. Until these idiot corporations realise that the *user experience* matters far more than whichever marketing buzzwords they've been able to shoehorn into their clunky tat, they're just going to keep on hearing a strange, almost continuous whooshing sound. It's the sound of the f*cking point whizzing right by them over and over again.
What galls most people about Apple's iPhone isn't the iPhone. It's the fact that—some *three years* after the first one was released—NOT ONE of the traditional mobile phone manufacturers has managed to come even close to understanding why it's been so successful, let alone coming up with a worthy rival.
The sheer blithering incompetence exhibited by some of these companies is staggering.
Zzzzzzz...
You know, it really is too late for this. When will the operators understand that we want them to be "pipes", no more, no less?
I want to buy a connection from them, maybe a handset if they'll subsidise it without crippling it. I don't want to buy music/video/ringtones/apps/anything else from them. What I want them to do is put their efforts into providing a good network with enough capacity (both voice and data) and stop wasting their time trying to muscle in on other markets they are patently useless at competing in. 'Scuse grammar.
Satire on a level with Pope
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/happy_32.png The idea of this group getting together and agreeing on anything put such a smile on my face that it is still there. This is truly hilarious. This will be as successful as the major music labels lame attempts to open digital sales beyond iTunes or in competition to it.
Sean Timarco Baggalay says it well, "What galls most people about Apple's iPhone isn't the iPhone. It's the fact that—some *three years* after the first one was released—NOT ONE of the traditional mobile phone manufacturers has managed to come even close to understanding why it's been so successful, let alone coming up with a worthy rival.
The sheer blithering incompetence exhibited by some of these companies is staggering."
Ditto
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