One of the more widely reported stories from MWC yesterday was the launch of the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), with a number of networks and manufacturers (including Verizon, Orange, Samsung and LG) promising to “unite a fragmented marketplace by involving players from all related industries”. Sounds a dream come true, but like many similar initiatives, this is unlikely to succeed, I reckon. Read on.

Let’s start with just three problems that I personally think they won’t be able to overcome.

Fragmentation in the market is a huge problem, and not just at the Operating System level. Carriers, especially US-based carriers, love to tinker with the firmware of devices, put their own portals on a handset, and generally control the supply chain. Putting in one application to each carrier means tweaking the app to work with that carrier’s requirements. Is this going to be magically waved away?

The mobile Operating Systems themselves will fracture as well. Google Android, even in its tightly controlled releases, has three separate versions already – and we’re all familiar with the fun that 3rd Edition and 5th Edition S60 smartphones can cause when downloading apps.

How to address all these handsets? It looks like WAC will be using JIL and BONDI, which are browser-based languages for web-based apps – and the carriers have been championing these for some time - yet pesky programmers keep turning to languages that offer more power, graphics and capabilities. Are JIL and BONDI attractive enough for mobile developers to take up?

And my favourite tongue in cheek, yet devastating, argument comes from someone on Twitter; this group are going to unify the application space over multiple devices, yet they can’t even get MMS interoperability nailed.

I’ll leave how impossible the following task is as an exercise for everyone to complete in the comments:

"…The alliance will utilise existing technical standards, rather than creating new ones, to allow developers to access operators’ assets, for example network capabilities or API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) more easily. In practice this means that developers will only have to create one version of their application and this can be used on multiple types of devices and operating systems (such as Symbian, Android, Windows etc), which is not the case today."

Also, for a group that includes some of the biggest names in mobile telecoms, they could really do with clubbing together and finding a web designer who can work on a design brief that doesn’t look like it's from 1997. Just look…

Finally, Wholesale Applications Community? WAC? Err, that just makes me think of the Wide Awake Club and Timmy Mallett.

-- Ewan Spence, Feb 2010.