Stuff the iPhone: Telstra to launch its own App Store

Mobile World Congress, Barcelona | Telstra is set to join the App Store crowd with the launch of a Big Pond-branded online store later this year.

The service will embrace the carrier’s current offerings such as simple mobile games, ringtones and wallpaper, but is expected to extend to more sophisticated mobile phone applications such as those offered by Apple for the iPhone.

It’s the same market which Microsoft and Nokia (along with Google, RIM and Palm) are all chasing for their respective online app stores, but with one crucial difference – Telstra would be the world’s first carrier to establish its own app store rather than rely on a specific platform partner.

Indeed, with the right degree of back-end intelligence, such a store could be freed from its conventional reliance on a single platform. The site could automatically detect which device and operating system the customer was using and serve up only those applications suited to that specific handset.

APC caught the carrier out during a preview of a new customised user interface which Telstra has cooked up for its Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 smartphone.



Sitting up front on the My Place page of links to Telstra sites and services was a glossy icon labelled ‘Big Pond Applications’, with a ‘download’ arrow forming the crossbar of the stylised letter A. The end result mimics the glyph of  Apple’s iPhone App Store.



(Clicking the link opened the Internet Explorer browser but as the phone wasn’t fitted with a SIM card, we couldn’t see what lurked on the other end of the link.)

Telstra’s Executive Director of Product Management, Ross Fielding, did a good job of blushing before hedging his way around the admission that yes, the carrier was working on an over-the-air app store.

“Yep, we want to do that. Our strategy is always to make sure that we invest in our Big Pond asset. You’ll start to see some pretty clever stuff happening in devices. I don’t know if we’ll call it the Telstra app store but it’ll be one click, pretty simple to use.”

Fielding said that while Big Pond already has something resembling an app store, mainly featuring mobile games, “we’ve got a little bit of work to do to work things out.”

“What what we see as the opportunity is to bring that right up to the front and make it easier for customers to get to. We’re not too proud, we’ve learned thing like that from people (like Apple). So watch this space – you’ll see us do more and more around that.”

Fielding tipped that the first iteration of the Big Pond App Store could appear as early as May, when Telstra will launch its customised panel for the Xperia. “We might do some of it then”, he suggested. “But I’ll say ‘no’ now, and if (the Xperia) does come out with something like that you’ll be surprised.”

David Flynn is attending Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as a guest of Microsoft.