Could this replace Apple's App Store, Google's Android Market, Palm's App Catalog, BlackBerry's App World??

<< Twenty-four leading telecommunications operators have formed the Wholesale Applications Community, an alliance to build an open platform that delivers applications to all mobile phone users...

The Wholesale Applications Community aims to unite a fragmented marketplace and create an open industry platform that benefits everybody – from applications developers and network operators to mobile phone users themselves.

The alliance's stated goal is to create a wholesale applications ecosystem that – from day one – will establish a simple route to market for developers to deliver the latest innovative applications and services to the widest possible base of customers around the world. In the immediate future the alliance will seek to unite members' developer communities and create a single, harmonised point of entry to make it easy for developers to join. >>

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/leading-operators-unite-to-unleash-global-apps-potential-2010-02-15

http://www.wholesaleappcommunity.com

I think the beneficiaries of this are the participating companies and the developers, not the users.

As I see it, a developer can submit their application once, and have it available on the app stores of all the participating companies. But it looks to me like the apps will be DRM-infested, and you won't be able to transfer the app you bought for your old Orange phone to (say) your new Samsung phone.

With so many parallel (if not "conflicting") technical platforms, and -profiles within platform is it any wonder that bought apps won't be transferable to other makes, if not models, of target company's cell phones? Unless we're talking of simple lowest-common-denominator Java apps that should be running everywhere...

All the same, it's a welcome move, if mainly for network providers and distributors, and not the actual end-users. The latter will always have the final say, as in e.g. "non-voting with their dollar$." Thus, if they do (vote, i.e. accept the distributor-friendly premise of that Wholesale Applications Community Store), then they deserve one another ;-))