AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG Electronics and 21 other telecoms announced the Wholesale Applications Community, a smartphone application store that they say will be bigger than those of Apple and the others combined. Their mission: “to encourage developers to create mobile and online applications for all smartphones and operating systems.”
The announcement was made on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The Wholesale Applications Community will be created as an open platform. The Global System for Mobile (GSM) Association, which hosts the conference, issued a statement on its website which states “For customers this means a broader choice of innovative applications and services available on a wider choice of devices than ever before.”
The site is envisioned as a resource that will provide developers with a way to publish and market their applications, and will offer the public faster access to new apps, with a larger selection than other, similar sites. Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association, put it this way, “This is tremendously exciting news for our industry and will serve to catalyze the development of a range of innovative, cross-device, cross-operator applications.”
