With the surging popularity of smartphones and other portable touch devices, mobile applications have also become the market with the most potential for growth and revenue. Take Apple’s iPhone for example. Steve Jobs and co. basically showed that not only can money be made from selling the phones, but also taking a cut from the amateur and professional developers who create the apps. As a result, consumers didn’t have to wait long to access a huge number (just over 180 000 as of February 2010) of apps that enhanced their mobile experience. Apps were available for everything from buying movie tickets online, storing recipes, editing documents, games, and social networking. Everybody wins, right?
As a testament to the success of the App Store, Research in Motion launched App World for BlackBerry users, Google’s Android users have Android Market, and the recently-announced Windows Phone 7 Series will have Marketplace.
The increasing number of smartphones and respective app stores certainly makes it confusing for consumers to choose apps, since a lot of mobile carriers offer their own online content.
That’s why there are some rumblings that carriers band together to form a global app store.
For example, Korea’s 3 mobile carriers are in talks to join and create a unified platform for online content regardless of phone model and carrier. Currently, the 3 carriers provide about 4-5 million applications that they sell separately.
Although rivalry between the 3 carriers is heated, the regulatory body (Korean Communications Commission) stated that it would be difficult for a single carrier to compete with the giants like Google and Apple.
Providing unified online content is not an idea restricted to Korea. The country’s 2 largest carriers (KT Telecom and SK Telecom) are also involved with the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), which is a partnership between 24 global carriers to create an open platform for mobile applications. Although integrating global carriers would give consumers better access to apps, it is unlikely that the platform will be as seamless as the ones provided by a single company like Apple.
