It appears that starting this Fall, T-Mobile USA will ditch its traditional stack of pre-installed applications on the phone. Instead, T-Mobile will be replacing it with a platform that will be open to any developer, for any platform. That's right, supported platforms would include the likes of Windows Mobile, or even include the currently nowhere-to-be-found Android.
Love it or hate it, no one can doubt the success of Apple's application store concept. But that's just 10 million Apple iPhone (well, 10 million is the target for end-2008 anyway, versus T-Mobile's 31.5 million subscribers). A number of details aren't clear at the moment, including how free applications will be handled. Still, it looks like T-Mobile will adopt a revenue-sharing model, with the carrier getting a higher percentage of the cut for applications that consume network resources.
For more about T-Mobile's plan for an application store:
- check out the article from the Washington Post [1]