T-Mobile Improves App Store Plans

With Apple's app store running at full steam and RIM and Microsoft primed to release theirs, T-Mobile wants subscribers to know that it's building an app store for everyone, not just smartphone owners.T-Mobile first announced its devPartner program last September. Since then, its made the program simpler for developers, changed the name to the T-Mobile Partner Network, and launched the first few apps, said Ian McKerlich, T-Mobile's director of mobile content and services.

"We want people to talk about us in the same positive breath that they would an Apple or an Android," he said.

Apps from the Partner Program are designed to work on T-Mobile's range of feature phones, such as the Sony Ericsson TM506 and Nokia 5310. T-Mobile also has BlackBerry, Android, and Windows Mobile smartphones, which will use their own operating systems' app stores.

T-Mobile has dramatically simplified its revenue-sharing system, McKerlich said. Initially, the program had a complicated series of carrots and sticks that would reward developers who did things like adhere to UI standards and penalize developers whose apps used too much data. That turned out to be hard for developers to work with, so T-Mobile went to a simple, industry standard 70/30 revenue split.

"We had a pretty sophisticated model that was elegant, but was a little too complex," McKerlich said.

T-Mobile now sells third-party applications through its Web2Go WAP page on phones such as the Sony Ericsson TM506. To help users pick apps, T-Mobile lets them rate apps on a 5-point scale. But the carrier still has a long way to go in terms of making the catalog easily accessible, sortable, and searchable, and McKerlich knows that.

T-Mobile is looking at social ranking systems, a "people's choice" category, and finding a way to get rid of the slow response times inherent in WAP catalogs, McKerlich said. The company is also trying to find a way to make its Web-based app catalog more visible; it's currently buried deep within T-Mobile's Web site.

T-Mobile's partner program has one big built-in disadvantage compared to smart phone app stores, McKerlich said: the fragmentation of Java. Java programs work a little differently on almost every phone, making it very difficult to build and sell Java programs that work on a wide range of handsets.

T-Mobile is making it "job one" to create a "homogenous development environment" on its Java phones, and its working with OEMs to try to find a way to standardize Java implementations, McKerlich said.

While a few apps such as Pelago's Whrrl and JuiceCaster made it into the partner program in 2008, T-Mobile users should expect to see a lot more activity in 2009 as the carrier works out the kinks.