The app store game is becoming a chaotic one, especially on the Android front, where the openness of the platform means that apps purchasing routes are getting as fragmented as the OS itself.
Various carriers, such as Vodafone, Verizon and China Mobile, have their own Android or multi-OS stores, and Amazon is expected to launch one soon. Now Huawei has its own Android shopfront, and another player with formidable retail presence and expertise - the Best Buy electronics chain – is said to be mulling its own entry into the market.
Huawei has opened what it calls the Digital Shopping Mall, a cross-platform store boasting 80,000 mobile applications alongside music, videos and ebooks, for Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian.
Like vendor initiatives from Alcatel-Lucent and Qualcomm, this is not a retail activity but a hosted white label offering for carriers and other brands, to speed their own time to market. Huawei, like Amazon, particularly emphasizes the social networking aspects of its store, which allow users to share and recommend content.
Operators can customize and brand the experience and support carrier billing or credit card payments. Developers and content publishers get the standard 70% revenue cut while the carriers get the remaining 30% and pay a fee to Huawei.
No operators are announced yet but the service will tap into multiscreen trends, and be accessible from phones, tablets, PCs and TVs.
Best Buy is meanwhile clearly keen to take a share of the action and insert its brand into yet another aspect of the mobile world - recently it has been swiftly expanding its wireless activities, with cellular and broadband plans and dedicated bricks-and-mortar stores.
A virtual Android store could follow - in response to a question about the Amazon plan, The Wall Street Journal says Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn said he would consider his own.
His CTO Robert Stephens later told Dow Jones: “We are exploring this concept at this very early stage, but we have no concrete plans at this time. Google, though, is an obvious partner.” Best Buy accounts for almost 20% of consumer electronics sales in the US.
While all these activities could boost Android software sales and allow users to work with the experience that suits them best, it will detract from Google's control and the hegemony of Android Market - in stark contrast to the monolithic and tightly controlled Apple App Store.
This article originally appeared in Rethink Wireless