Telecoms Unite: One Mobile App Development Platform For All

The group, calling itself the Wholesale Applications Community, will attempt to overcome the fragmentation in the mobile application market.

The companies unveiled plans for the new initiative at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Spain, this week. Participants include AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Sprint, Verizon Wireless and Vodaphone. Device manufacturers LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson are also backing the effort.

The Wholesale Applications Community Web site said the initiative will "establish a simple route to market for developers and provide them with access to a customer base of over 3 billion customers."

Apple has been wildly successful in getting developers to build applications that run on the iPhone. There are more than 100,000 applications offered through the Apple App Store, the company said in November, and last month the number of apps downloaded by customers hit the 3 billion mark.

Applications written for the iPhone, or for other proprietary platforms such as the BlackBerry, can't run on other mobile devices. Observers say the situation is similar to the early days of the PC market -- circa the late 1970s and early 1980s -- when applications written for a PC from one manufacturer couldn't run on another. Eventually Microsoft's MS-DOS, and later Windows, became the de facto standard PC operating environment.

The GSM Association, an organization of mobile operators and related companies, is supporting the plan to "build a new, open ecosystem to spur the creation of applications that can be used regardless of device, operating system or operator," said GSMA CEO Rob Conway in a statement.

The alliance plans to initially base the common standard on existing development specifications, including the Joint Innovation Lab's Widget Initiative and the Bondi development kit from the Open Mobile Terminal Platform organization, the alliance said in a statement. The program also leverages work the GSMA has done developing its OneAPI set of open programming interfaces, Conway said.

The alliance expects to develop the common standard "within the next 12 months," according to the alliance statement.

"Ultimately, we will collectively work with the W3C [World Wide Web Consortium] for a common standard based on our converged solution to truly ensure developers can create applications that port across mobile device platforms, and in the future between fixed and mobile devices," the statement said.