Applications Spur Carriers to Relax Grip on Cellphones
By LAURA M. HOLSON The New York Times August 4, 2008
In the first 10 days after Apple opened its App Store for the iPhone, consumers downloaded more than 25 million applications, ranging from games like Super Monkey Ball to tools like New York City subway maps. It was nothing short of revolutionary, not only because the number was so high but also because iPhone users could do it at all.
Consumers have long been frustrated with how much control carriers - AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and the like - have exerted over what they could download to their mobile phones. But in the last nine months, carriers, software developers and cellphone makers have embraced a new attitude of openness toward consumers.
Verizon Wireless, which said in November that it would open its network to any device maker that could create a mobile phone compatible with its network, has already welcomed a few business-oriented devices. It hopes to announce new consumer phones in the coming months. When the world's largest cellphone maker, Nokia, recently took full ownership of Symbian, which owns a popular mobile operating system, it agreed to share the software with other phone makers.
And on Monday, the LiMo Foundation, an alliance of companies promoting a rival operating system open to makers of all wireless devices, is announcing that seven new mobile phones would use that system, bringing the number to 21.
AT&T, like Verizon, has followed suit with a promise to also open its networks.
But the pressure on AT&T is also coming from another direction: Apple, its iPhone partner. AT&T has no control over the applications downloaded to the iPhones, which AT&T offers exclusively. But the proliferation of new applications and the realization that they only make cellphones more popular has convinced executives there that they need to give consumers more freedom.
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