Sony Ericsson Joins the App Store Crowd

By August its customers will be able to personalize their phones with a range of downloadable utilities, tools, and games over multiple platforms

By Kerry Capell

On June 3 mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson used the occasion of the annual JavaOne software developers' conference in San Francisco to announce that it, too, will launch an online software applications store. By August, Sony Ericsson customers will be able to personalize their phones with a range of downloadable programs such as utilities, tools, and games.

In announcing its own virtual software mall, Sony Ericsson—a joint venture of Japan's Sony (SNE) and Sweden's Ericsson (ERIC)—joins an increasingly crowded field of rivals jostling to replicate the huge success of the Apple (AAPL) iTunes App Store, which offers thousands of programs for the popular iPhone. In recent weeks, both Nokia (NOK), the world's No. 1 handset maker, and Vodafone (VOD), the world's largest mobile operator by revenue, have jumped into the fray, following the path of other handset makers and carriers such as BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIMM) and France Telecom's (FTE) Orange unit.

One way Sony Ericsson hopes to stand out is by supporting a wide range of software environments in its phones—including not just internally developed platforms but also the Symbian operating system, the mobile version of Microsoft (MSFT) Windows, and the new open-source Android system backed by Google (GOOG). To help independent developers get around the complexity of supporting so many options, Sony Ericsson is putting a heavy emphasis on mobile Java, an intermediary layer from Sun Microsystems (JAVA)—soon to be owned by Oracle (ORCL)—that lets authors write a program once and run it on many different platforms.

Aiming for Affordability

Sony Ericsson's new app store will initially lean toward programs written for Java or directly for Symbian, but the company says it will expand support to other platforms later this year. Starting on July 1, developers will be able to submit programs to Sony Ericsson for testing and approval, and if the apps are accepted, they'll go live within a month.

Initially, the service will be limited to the 13 countries where Sony Ericsson's high-end PlayNow online music and media store is now available, but the company aims to set up shop in other countries before the end of the year. Sony Ericsson will handle all billing and collections for apps and then pass 70% of revenues back to developers.

Another differentiator for Sony Ericsson is that, thanks to Java, it aims to migrate the phenomenon of downloadable apps down from high-end smartphones—which typically cost upwards of $500 before rebates—into more prosaic "feature phones" that can cost less than $200.

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