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Twenty four of the worlds biggest mobile phone companies, including Vodafone, China Mobile and Sprint, have joined forces to rival the dominance of the app stores, such as Apple.

Called ‘The Wholesale Applications Community’, one aim is to help the developer community by making it easier to create and subsequently sell ‘generic’ applications.

The app market is a hugely lucrative business for mobile firms so it’s understandable more phone companies want to cash in on the estimated 21 billion downloads we will witness by 2013, which is expected to yield almost $30bn (research by Gartner).

Developers currently have to create different versions of an application to be suitable for different devices, encountering various approval processes along the way. By having one platform, and one point of entry, developers will be able to create one version of an application for multiple devices, harmonising the way mobile applications are distributed.

I am sceptical of how much headway they’ll be able to make and have heard and seen these types of consortiums before so it’ll be interesting to see if this one is any different. As always, we will keep our visitors and our partners updated as and when further information becomes available.