Talking during an ecosystem panel in the mobile gaming track of Apps World 12, Vodafone Group's head of games, Suresh Sudera, revealed a significant shift for the operator.

Cut out of the iOS market by Apple, many operators - including Vodafone - have been looking to Android as an opportunity.

However, Sudera said that Vodafone's initiative to run its own heavily curated Android app store had be bought to an end.

"There are just too many app stores," Sudera said.

"Some games from small developers did very well on our app store, but we couldn't provide the volume that the big publishers wanted across their entire portfolio of games."

A new approach

Instead, Vodafone will now be looking to use its existing retail and online marketing muscle to push content that it thinks will be high quality for its users - albeit downloaded via Google Play.

It will also release a selection of API, inluding billing and geolocation, that it will encourage/require developers whose content it is pushing to use.