MWC post game: Taking back apps

Every year at Mobile World Congress I’m queried as to what I see as the big news or trends at the show. Digging through the bevy of announcements, initiatives and minor controversies it’s always difficult to come up with a coherent theme, but at this year’s Congress the big picture emerged on day 1: Operators want to take back what’s theirs (or at least what they think is theirs).

There’s a growing discontent among operators with the new mobile data world order as it has emerged today. On one hand they thank there lucky stars for companies such as Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), which have tapped into the true potential of the smartphone and the 3G network, but on the other hand the emergence of those two as mobile titans has increasingly cut operators out of the value chain. They’re managing the app stores, the developer relationships and in many cases critical aspects of the customer relationship. It’s hard not to get the impression that operators are just along for the ride, becoming the dumb pipes they dread so much.

This year they decided to do something about it, and what’s more they decided to do that something collectively. Twenty-four of the world’s largest operators launched what they called the Wholesale Applications Community, which, in a nutshell, is an effort to create a common development platform across all of their networks. The appeal is simple: A developer builds an app once and it works the world over, with the potential of exposure to billions of subscribers. Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android communities are big, but they aren’t that big. The Wholesale Apps Community is starting out small, focusing initially on widgets, but as Alex Sinclair, chief technology officer for the GSM Association, said at the Congress, there is potential to do a whole lot more.

The wholesale apps announcement was definitely the kicker, but there were other indications of the “take back apps” trend. It’s probably no coincidence that Alcatel-Lucent chose to unveil its Application Exposure Suite, announcing its plans to collect application programming interfaces (APIs) from operators around the globe to distribute as bundles to developers. The logic behind the initiative is the same behind the wholesale apps effort: Rather than build a separate location-based app for each operator, build a single location-based app for every operator simultaneously.

Operators and Internet companies also seemed to show a much greater willingness to work with one another. Google CEO Eric Schmidt extended an olive branch to the wireless world during his keynote at the Congress, saying the Internet giant’s biggest focus was on mobility, but it wouldn’t come at the expense of the operators. Schmidt assured the Congress Google’s goal wasn’t to reduce operators to dumb pipes, though many operators — particularly ones in the U.S. — probably took Schmidt’s comments skeptically, considering Google’s growing incursions onto their traditional turf. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD) seems to have adopted an if-you-can’t-beat-‘em approach to over-the-top services. VZW partnered with old foe Skype to offer voice-over-IP providers cheap international calling service over its own voice network. Though Skype and VZW didn’t reveal any details of their business arrangement, Verizon appears to be acknowledging it can’t keep Skype off its network, so it might as well share in the revenues and get a few more data subscriptions to boot.

E-mail me at kevin.fitchard@penton.com.
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