By the end of 2009, swing a handset and you'll hit a bunch of app stores. BlackBerry App World, Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Ovi Store, Palm Software Store, Android Market, and of course the iPhone App Store itself. And as for mobile operators...
Well, the operators are working on their own app stores too, stung by the widely-expressed belief that the stores listed above make the carrier portals look distinctly old-hat.
PocketGamer.biz is in Paris today nosing around Orange's innovation labs, checking out some of the company's new technologies. And one of them is the Orange Application Store.
It's already available on some handsets in France, but the proper rollout is due to happen in Q4 this year, starting with France and the UK. The store will be preloaded on new handsets, and available to download for existing customers.
The store will offer free and paid apps, with some of the latter available as free trials. Payments will be billed to users' Orange mobile accounts, while apps are being sourced from publishers, developers and aggregators.
Orange says the store will work on bog-standard Java phones right through to the most sophisticated smartphones which should be interesting given that most of the latter will have their own manufacturer-run app stores on board.
We asked Orange's Christophe Francois about this very question. Here's his answer:
Our primary focus here is to serve the part of the market which has no embedded solution mostly Java handsets. But we also have very tight relationships with big companies like Nokia, RIM and others, and we are actually in deep discussion to find the best user experience.
And: What matters is simplicity for the consumer. We don't really want our consumers to have to enter credit card details, open an account, and if they have an issue they don't know who to call. It's something that's going to unfold in the next few months. We're working with them [the manufacturers] from that perspective.
Read into that what you will.
We're not being mischievous when we suggest that there's going to be friction and indeed already is between operators and handset manufacturers toting rival app stores for the same handsets.
Orange hasn't revealed its planned revenue share for developers on its Application Store, although the operator told us today that it sees it as extremely competitive with the 70-30 split that's becoming a standard for app stores, once the effect of Orange's promotion of applications is considered.
To our ears, that means a lower revenue share, allied to the somewhat nebulous benefits of operator promotion. Which is exactly what developers criticise the traditional operator portals for.
In any case, watching how the Orange Application Store fares will be fascinating in the months ahead, and the company deserves credit for being one of the first operators to respond to the challenge laid down by the handset app stores.
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Contributing Editor
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)
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