One of the more widely reported stories from MWC yesterday was the launch of the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), with a number of networks and manufacturers (including Verizon, Orange, Samsung and LG) promising to “unite a fragmented marketplace by involving players from all related industries”. Sounds a dream come true, but like many similar initiatives, this is unlikely to succeed, I reckon. Read on.
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You forgot the most important argument, Ewan. Operators think they can get 60% of the sales price for payment handling. That is twice as much as Apple is asking.
If they offer payment handling for (let's say) 10%, they will certainly make a very interesting proposition. That is, if they manage to get rid of all the technical issues, which I doubt they will manage anytime soon.
What would be useful is to be able to download an app and be billed through your contract, or have the cost debited from the available call credit.
The unified app space thing is amusing. Sounds like a sales and marketing guy has been taken in by some java hype.
Seems to be a ways off at best, but hey, any new way of allowing developers get our apps exposed to more consumers is a good thing, not to mention I'd surely rather pay 60% of the total app sales price to an operator that gives the user direct billing (rather than say, credit card billing) vs 58% to the greedy bastards over at handango! IMHO, anything that puts another nail in their coffin is good news!
Cheers!
Josh @ Killer Mobile
I don't know why they're are still dreaming about making one app that runs on every device, that is a myth. Any developer that's gone through the J2ME early days knows that & have suffered from it.
Back in real world developers just have to tough up & develop for all OS using the best available platform to make the best app for that platform. If that means learning VB, .Net, C, C++, Objective C, Java, so be it.
What we want is a fair revenue share deal. The operators are still having the landlord mentality of charging 50% of revenue for handling payment. Even the mighty Nokia with the Ovi Store is not spared. If you read the agreement, Nokia states that the 70% net revenue that they pay developers is NET of fixed operator billing which ranges from 40-50% depending on the price of app.
That leaves us with a paltry 35-42%, that's much lower than 70% that Apple gives. Or better still, use Paypal, they only charge between 4-5%.
One possible hope in the horizon is OneAPI. You can see the list of APIs available here http://oneapi.aepona.com/portal/tws_gsma/Resources/Library.
They plan to add payment APIs & hopefully the operators will not be greedy & see the light. If they don't want to be called dumb pipes then they should smarten up. The reason that i-mode was a big success in Japan was not technical, its because they only charge 10% for payment processing.