Starting the day with some great news – T-Mobile’s opening up an application store for its phones. Eventually every phone (or at least every smartphone) will have an application store like Apple’s – combining centralized distribution & payments with a wide degree of customer choice. moconews has more details, including a revenue share based on bandwidth usage. (Hopefully the small amount of server communications done by basic in-application analytics won’t be enough to put the application in a less-favorable revenue-sharing bracket.)
Still no sense of how T-Mobile’s going to combat the fragmentation problem – since their phones run a variety of operating systems, and the specs of those phones vary widely, programming an application with real audience reach is somewhat less than fun. Perhaps their partnership with Device Anywhere, a company that lets developers test on hundreds of different handsets remotely, will help ease the pain.
One final thought – since this is a carrier-specific application store, not a phone-specific one, and since there’s a whole lot of carriers out there with widely varying resources, a start-up could probably do good business just developing generic ‘Application Store’ software. They’d have to have some pretty impressive business development chops to deal directly with the carriers, but there’s certainly going to be demand for their product.
