MacFlaunt

The iPhone’s dominance over mobile applications could be numbered. 24 mobile networks across the world, including the likes of iPhone carriers Orange and Vodafone, are to unite in order to create a competitor for the iPhone App Store.

The sudden alliance between all the mobile companies will create an “open platform” for developers, allowing them to reach out to 3 billion consumers – which would make the initiative the biggest application store once launched.

The announcement was made at the Mobile World Congress this morning, with GSMA, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG also supporting the movement. Called the “Wholesale Applications Community”, the store will aim to provide developers with a single point-of-entry – this way the developer could create apps across all mobile platforms, rather than the current problem of having to create different versions of the app for different stores (iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia and Symbian). However, this could be pretty difficult, due to technicalities of uniting all the different operators and and platforms signing up. This may take the WAC up to 12 months to roll out.

“The GSMA is fully supportive the Wholesale Applications Community, which will build a new, open ecosystem to spur the creation of applications that can be used regardless of device, operating system or operator,” said Rob Conway, CEO of GSMA. “This is tremendously exciting news for our industry and will serve to catalyse the development of a range of innovative cross-device, cross-operator applications.”

Jonathan Arber, Senior Research Analyst at IDC, said: “Attracting and retaining developers is vital for any application store offering to succeed. However, mobile application developers currently face a high level of fragmentation in the industry, in terms of both technology platforms, and individual operators’ working practices.

“Developers want to meet the largest possible addressable market, as efficiently and painlessly as possible, and the Wholesale Applications Community initiative can meet these criteria by providing a simple, single point of access to a large number of operator storefronts. The initiative should also help to drive uptake of existing, open standards among developers, operators and manufacturers, thereby reducing fragmentation and benefiting the whole industry,” Arber said.

So the iPhone better watch out, heavy competition could be on its way. However, while the WAC work out the technicalities of how to create a single platform an app store on different mobile operating systems, Apple shouldn’t be scared just yet. As Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch says, if it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is, and is purely a pipe dream of carriers looking to loosen Apple’s hold on mobile applications.

Learn more about the Wholesale Applications Community here.