Giant App Store Rival Taking Shape at MWC 2010: Wholesale Applications Community

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The fact that Apple changed the whole smartphone business with its iPhone followed by its very successful App Store is something even Cupertino’s worst enemies secretly agree with. No wonder Steve Jobs won the “Personality of the Year” at MWC 2010 without Apple actually being part of the Spanish show.

But it looks like various manufacturers and carriers all over the world have joined forces to fight the “evil.” In this case we’re talking about a giant, universal, “open international applications platform” that should be able to somehow stop Apple’s App Store expansion and counter the effects it has on people.

No less than twenty four companies have decided to team up and form a new giant App Store rival. Carriers like Verizon Wireless, AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile and Vodafone are going to work together to implement the new apps platform. They will be joint by America Movil, Bharti Airtel, China Unicom, KT, mobilkom Austria group, MTN Group, Orange, Orascom Telecom, Softbank Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Telenor Group, TeliaSonera, SingTel, SK Telecom, Sprint, VimpelCom and Wind. These companies alone service over three billion customers around the world so theoretically their joint mission could be successful.

Furthermore, supporting this initiative are LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. Even the GSMA thinks it’s a good idea so we’ll be really interested to see who everything will turn out.

This impressive alliance will apparently use “JIL and OMTP BONDI requirements and turn these standards into a common standard in the following 12 months”. What they want to do is to “ensure developers can create applications that port across mobile device platforms” which doesn’t sound that bad. But will such an app store really work out? Will it be popular? Will it be profitable? Will developers be interested in working with this Wholesale Applications Community alliance?

In 12 months time Apple will sell even more iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. The App Store will grow a lot more and it will be really difficult to beat by any of its competitors. It’s funny how some of the carriers mentioned above already sell the iPhone in various markets and some of them are even advertising its App Store. Are they going to promote both stores, one the alliance app store takes off?