Organisations join forces to combat Apple

Mobile applications market to hit nearly $30 billion by 2013 say Gartner

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), a telco-led organisation announced at the recent Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona, is to co-operate more closely with mobile Linux group LiMo, according to a Reuters report released today.

The 24 members of WAC intend to deliver open platform mobile applications to customer devices, and the co-operation with LiMo will help them to do this, thereby stemming competition from device vendors Apple, Google and Nokia in the mobile applications market.

LiMo executive director Morgan Gillis told the news agency that its initial talks with WAC regarding mobile applications development got a warm response. " The industry is trying to carve out an independent approach. It is trying to deal with the competition in a co-operative, co-ordinated way," said Gillis.

That market is expected to see massive growth in the next five years, but is currently dominated by Apple with its Apps Store.

Gartner figures show Apple gaining 99.4 per cent of mobile applications sales in 2009, and the analyst firm predicts revenue of $29.5bn (£19.7bn) in 2013.

WAC members include carriers AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Telefonica, and Verizon Wireless, as well as hardware vendors LG, Samsung, and Sony-Ericsson.

LiMo's brief is to establish a competitive mobile Linux OS fit for the smartphone market, and its members include some who signed up to WAC at MWC, such as Samsung and Vodafone.

How big telecoms firms and mobile operators approach mobile applications will be key to their top line, but industry experts are not convinced that organisations like WAC will be able to compete effectively with smaller agile device vendors such as Apple.