A Standards-Based App Store Is Still Mostly A Work In Progress
Any serious attempt by a global consortium of carriers and handset-makers to build a streamlined application community is still years off from being a threat to Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) or Android. Today, the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), unveiled its corporate structure, including its management team and board of directors. It also released details on a multi-year plan on how it will work with developers and monetize apps.
In February, two dozen carriers and handset makers worldwide pledged their support to WAC in response to increasing competition from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market. At the time, no one knew how they’d work together, but now the consortium has set up offices in London, and today has appointed Peters Suh as CEO. It also reiterated that it will join forces with the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL), which was a similar effort led by Verizon Wireless, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), Softbank and China Mobile. It also named a 14-member board comprising of high-level execs today, including AT&T’s CTO John Donovan, Olivier Baujard, CTO of Deutsche Telekom (NYSE: DT) and Dick Lynch, EVP and CTO of Verizon.
Still, major milestones for the organization are in the distance. WAC and JIL won’t formally merge until September, and by November, the WAC will publish its first specifications and a developer kit. Applications won’t be deployed until 2011. Given that this is a long-term market, the timing is not a deal-breaker and the biggest appeal of WAC may be its ability to reach a large audience with supposedly less development time.
To its credit, WAC says at launch applications will be distributed through carriers’ respective storefronts, and charges will appear on a consumer’s phone bill. However, pricing is a bit in flux. Developers will set the the price of the app, but the revenue share will be determined on an operator-by-operator basis. In addition, WAC will receive a small fee to cover its operating costs. The store will also not support a lot of features that are considered standard today, like purchases from within an application, location-based services, or advertising.
It looks like WAC are using W3C standard API’s. If that is true, then there is nothing stopping this from being successful. Almost all smartphones support W3C HTML5 because they have the Apple WebKit browser core, and Blackberry will add it by fall 2010 and Microsoft promises to add HTML5 sometime in 2011 if their new Windows Phone 7 platform survives that long. If WAC want to put a runtime on each device for Java or Flash then they are going nowhere. There are just too many obstacles to doing that and you would basically be duplicating the efforts of HTML5.
if you only all knew the truth about JIL… this is nothing but a pipe dream that will fall apart in a few months. Non of this is necessary.
W3C standards are for app portability across devices, during build time and run time. I’ve personally not seen any real standards being proposed for the actual app store distribution platform and its interfaces, as being planned by the WAC, although there are some good specifications from OMA and TM Forum to be considered.