Verizon is planning an attempt to court mobile application developers on July 28 in order to convince them to develop for its upcoming app store. Yes, another app store. GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham spoke to Verizon’s vice president of Partner Management, Ryan Hughes, last week to wring some details out of him and this is what she found out.
First of all, Verizon’s app store will be the only offering on the company’s handsets. This means that consumers looking for the Blackberry App World or the upcoming Windows Marketplace will have to download them on their own. Second of all, while developers can build apps for whatever platform they’d like, their apps will need to be tied to a Verizon API for such things as billing and location info, and pass a carrier verification process. While carriers are famous for making lives difficult for developers, Hughes told GigaOm that it plans to be at least as open as other app stores on the market currently.
As for pay, Hughes didn’t elaborate other than to say that developer pay would be “competitive” with the market. The app store will be clearly aimed at smartphones but Verizon will still keep its Qualcomm BREW platform open for mass-market feature phones.
