Two initiatives have been driven by the GSM Association - OneAPI, which aims to help cellcos open their billing assets to apps developers in a standardized way, and the Wholesale Application Community (WAC), which is working to establish a neutral wholesale framework for apps developers. WAC - which released its first SDK last year - is building a widget framework based on specs already developed by JIL (Joint Innovation Lab) and OMTP (via its BONDI standard). WAC's specs will allow developers to create web apps and widgets with richer functionality, and via a single entity that allows them to bypass the headaches of writing for various OSs. More to the point, WAC - combined with OneAPI - also gives cellcos a way to participate more directly in the apps ecosystem not only by offering WAC widgets, but also adding differentiated value to them via their own APIs.
A third initiative - and one that's been around for a couple of years - is the LiMo Foundation, an operator-led group that counts NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone among its founders that is developing an open-source Linux-based OS for handsets intended as a neutral alternative to vendor OSs from Apple, Google and Microsoft.
All of this - LiMo, WAC and OneAPI - is the result of operators "collaborating in order to establish a strong horizontal ecosystem to compete with or at least counter-balance the strong vertical ecosystem from Apple and the elaborate ecosystem Google is establishing around Android," says LiMo Foundation executive director Morgan Gilles.
"The neutral device platform enables the operators to have freedom of choice in terms of which application environments and which app stores they deploy in conjunction with the handset," Gilles told Wireless Asia. "Android is obviously tied in with Google, so it's a channel to market for Google apps and advertising, whereas in the LiMo case, operators have freedom to deploy their own app stores and work closely with the WAC infrastructure and establish their own value."
Practically speaking, he adds, "These platforms are knitted together through APIs, that determine the flow of added value through apps and content into the core business model of the operators. So you have a marrying of business strategy and technology strategy."
What all this means in terms of the bottom line is, of course, too early to tell. WAC was scheduled to open for business at the Mobile World Congress in February as we went to press, and while the LiMo Foundation says 65 handsets are on the market running LiMo, that's from just four handset makers - NEC, Panasonic, Samsung and Motorola (with the first two accounting for most of that figure). Gilles says more devices will becoming out with the latest version of the LiMo platform in the second half of this year.