Apple’s iPhone application storefront has revolutionized the mobile industry and been further enhanced by the Blackberry App World and Android Marketplace. But so far, application stores have been highly vertical, only serving one type of device. For carriers and developers this only serves to fragment the mobile market and slows down innovation. For end users it means that using an application on one mobile device doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work on another, even if both are supplied by the same carrier.
Qualcomm aims to change this with the announcement of Plaza Retail, a mobile application and content solution with a focus on openness and interoperability. Plaza Retail provides wireless providers a suite of tools to offer all customers mobile applications from the same storefront, no matter which mobile phone they own. Plaza supports Qualcomm’s BREW, Java, Blackberry and Flash currently, with plans to support Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian and LiMo in the future. Application providers will be able to set up customized storefronts in a variety of ways: dedicated client, web, or WAP.
Not only is this great for carriers, enabling them to enter the mobile content market easily, retain some control, and tap into another source of revenue, but for developers this is great because they’ll have one application store to deal with for a variety of different platforms. Sure they’ll still have to code in a variety of languages, but by dealing with a single carrier of their choosing, it eliminates the headaches of dealing with multiple terms, agreements and payment solutions from multiple vertically-oriented application stores.
This is a good start toward consolidating the fragmented mobile industry. But in the end it still doesn’t really eliminate the need to code multiple apps for different handsets. Yes, it provides a unified distribution solution, but we still have a long way to go. It’ll be interesting to see if this catches on with carriers and exactly how well it monetizes for application developers.
