Although the iPhone's App Store boasts over 3 billion downloads and nigh on 80 million users, a consortium of mobile companies has revealed plans at this year's Mobile World Congress to dwarf those numbers by providing a single access route to over 2 billion customers.

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) is a global alliance established by 24 leading telecommunications operators and device manufacturers to provide software developers with a common standard for games and apps across the different mobile platforms.

Participants in the WAC include América Móvil, AT&T, Bharti Airtel, China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, KT, mobilkom austria group, MTN Group, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Orascom Telecom, Softbank Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor Group, TeliaSonera, SingTel, SK Telecom, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, VimpelCom, Vodafone and Wind, with manufacturers LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson also ready to come onboard.

"The alliance will utilise existing technical standards, rather than creating new ones to allow developers to access operators’ assets," the WAC website explains. "In practice this means that developers will only have to create one version of their application and this can be used on multiple types of devices and operating systems (such as Symbian, Android, Windows etc) which is not the case today."

Mobile-Ent