Windows Phone Thoughts: T-Mobile USA To Copy Apple - Opening Own Application Store For Subscribers

"Starting this fall, T-Mobile USA will take the extraordinary step of ditching its traditional deck on the phone and replacing it with a platform that's open to almost any developer, multiple sources have told us. Think of Apple's App store, but for the entire carrier's handset line-up from smartphone to feature phone. As one developer, who was briefed on the matter, said: "The App store was a big deal, but that's one phone. This is an entire carrier." In other words, we are talking about T-Mobile's 31.5 million subscribers today vs. the 10 million iPhones Apple expects to sell by year-end."

That could be a really good experience for the end user, and quite a benefit for application developers as well. T-Mobile is committed to supporting the Sidekick and Windows Mobile phones, as well as those that support Java applications. The cut T-Mobile takes will depend on the bandwidth the app uses, so a streaming video app would garner a larger cut for T-Mobile than a PIM app that may rarely, if ever, use the network directly. There are no details on how the end user will access this, though I assume it would be some app on the phone itself that would be like a catalog. I hope T-Mobile makes this app, or whatever the mechanism is, available to people with current phones and even unlocked phones that have a T-Mobile SIM in it.