iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm, and now even Nokia with its OVI. If you say AppStore, then most operators content revenues and moods probably start shivering. Why is that? They are afraid that the “AppStore”s, lets call them, will hit their mobile content, primarily mobile game revenues - a lot. And yes, it’s true - they wil.

Now let’s look at the timeline of these AppStores. First, Apple introduced their iPhone AppStore - a concept based on their iTunes Music Store, and was thought to be a success. Even though in most countries it needs registration and credit card details, eventually if you go through this great pain, you can experience good shopping and downloading of mobile content. Next, device manufacturers became very excited about this, and all wanted to implement this. Well let’s stop here for a while…

Now why were device manufacturers so hyped about this solution? Well for starters, they would receive revenue from something, which they never received revenue from. This was usually the operators domain, and they were “pushing” mobile device manufacturers like crazy to just implement their own original links. Well and what is the device manufacturer most worried about? It is getting there in front of the operator, and selling those phones - a great position for the operators to be in - and btw: if you won’t preinstall my links, I won’t put you in my offering, and won’t buy your phones.

That is an excellent proposition, and operators were able to play with this for a long, long time - until one day, here comes Apple, and hypes the entire market, not only companies, but also end users for their phone. The mobile phone users became completelly hungry for the device, and mobile operators despite their normal rules, waved the thing that Apple is selling content and music on their own. With AppStore, Apple brough to the market something, that the entire market was screaming for years, but operators couldn’t give it to the users.

“Apple brough to the market something, that the entire market was screaming for years, but operators couldn’t give it to the users. “

OK, leaving the past in the past, we look at now - its last month of Q1 2009, and OEMs have announced two weeks ago, that they are launching their own AppStores. Because Apple has made this a precedent, mobile operators will probably be launching the phones from Nokia, and others - if everyone will have the same united solution.

But the question now is - will operators tolerate this? They have entire departments built on mobile content revenues, and will they want to just give this away to device manufacturers? This is a big question. If I was in the position of a mobile operators mobile content department, pretty much now would be the time I would wake up, and start taking actions - and start pushing device manufacturers to start “behaving”, and delivering the devices with the proper links and preinstalled homepages to their own. Question is, if mobile manufacturers will respect this - my opinion is, that if mobile operators will be hard enough and take an international approach in this, they can push this through, and make let’s say their own AppStore technologies.

I would advise mobile operators to get ready with their own AppStore technology, they can do this - together with their suppliers, they can easily built Symbian, Java, Windows Mobile, Android, and Palm technologies (not iPhone probably), and deliver in these mobile phones as native solutions - and promote it on T-Zones. They definitely have the power to do this. The huge advantage of mobile operators is their direct connectivity - an issue the device manufacturers will always be fighting with - the issue that most people won’t want to give out their credit card details.

So, let’s see. I would say its time for an AppStore fight - Operators vs. Device manufacturers. Fight!