The Wholesale Applications Community Sounds Like A Disaster In The Making

This morning, twenty four of the world's largest telecom companies announced their plans to create the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), a unified open platform that lets developers build an application once, and deploy it to work on any carrier, device, and OS. The roster of supporters include many of the biggest names in the business: AT&T, China Mobile, Orange, Verizon, Sprint, and many other operators around the globe, as well as device manufacturers LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, all of whom are teaming up to take on Apple's App Store dominance. In short, it sounds like a miracle for mobile developers.

If it sounds too good to be true, that's because it probably is. Andy Rubin, Google VP of Engineering (and the man in charge of Android) has already shared his skepticism, saying, "There is always a dream that you could write [a program] once and [have it] run anywhere and history has proven that that dream has not been fully realised and I am sceptical that it ever will be". To put it another way, this is a pipe dream from carriers looking to loosen Apple's stranglehold over mobile applications and there's very little chance that it's going to work.