Twenty-four wireless telecommunications companies united to announce the Wholesale Applications Community at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  Gizmodo has a good overview of the announcement on one of its blogs.  The concept sounds great on the surface, but I am less than enthusiastic they will have any meaningful success.

They are attempting to solve a worthy problem. Every mobile application developer faces a huge hill to climb every time they want to develop a new application.  If you want to write a piece of software that will run on most of the smartphones out there so you have a large market, here is what you have to do:

• Design the application
• If you want to develop for the iPhone:

1. 1. Download the Software Developer’s Kit
   2. Write the application
   3. Test the application
   4. Sign up as a developer on the App Store
   5. Pay your fee
   6. Agree to all the contractual obligations
   7. Submit you application for approval
   8. Wait, wait, and then wait some more
   9. Celebrate when your application is finally approved
   10. Hopefully begin selling your software

• If you want to develop for the BlackBerry, repeat steps 1-10 above
• If you want to develop for Android, repeat steps 1-10 above
• I could go on, but I think you get the idea

Conceptually what the Wholesale Applications Community wants to do is great. They want to make an environment where a developer can write a piece of software once, and then be able to port (technical term for copy) the application to multiple other types of phones on multiple other carriers (Verizon, Sprint, etc.).  They also want the developer to not have to deal with multiple app stores from multiple device makers.  Sounds great, right?

Problem is, it won’t work. If you know me personally, you would know that I am a very optimistic person. So why do I think this is a lost cause. Because it has been tried before in many situations other than mobile applications, and it has always failed.  There are many reasons for this, but here are my top three for this specific instance:

1. Even though you provide a common software development environment, by definition it must support devices with a least common denominator approach. As soon as a device maker offers, and a developer takes advantage of, a unique feature on a specific device, the application is no longer portable to other devices.
2. Apple, BlackBerry, and Google already have pretty well established App Stores. Introducing a new app store alternative will be pretty difficult, even if it helps the developer community. Let’s face it, there are technology bigots who are in love with devices from a specific maker, and they are very unlikely to be open to trying other environments.
3. Look at who is missing from the list of supporters for this effort. No Apple. No BlackBerry (RIM for you industry folks). No Google. No Microsoft. Nuff said.

Once you have been around information technology for a while, you see trends repeat themselves over an over. The whole concept of a common development environment has been attempted many times. It really started common programming languages like FORTRAN, and with Operating Systems like Unix.  The idea of a common app store married with a common development environment is just a different spin on the same theme.  I get why they are doing it. I just don’t think it will succeed.

Remember, this is just my opinion, and your mileage may vary.