The wireless industry is fueled by constant innovation. Few industries match our pace in a given year. But our achievements, ideas and products are not always widely adopted by customers. Why?
Ease of use is our industry’s killer app. Without ease of use, our hard work and best ideas can be lost for months or years, if adopted at all. At AT&T, we are committed to delivering products that are easy, intuitive, and discoverable. We simultaneously strive to offer our customers flexibility to choose the best products. Both goals are driven by a relentless focus on the customer, key to winning in the marketplace.
Rise of the app stores
One of the newest, hottest spots in the market is the rise in the number of ‘app stores.’ The possibilities are exciting, innovative and diverse. Because carriers manage the customer experience, we’re exploring these stores with our partners using the same, consistent filter: ease-of-use and choice, defined through a relentless focus on the customer.
The confluence of ease of use and choice will result in multiple, specialized app stores for AT&T customers in the near-term, though our long-term hope for the industry is greater interoperability among applications and operating systems. As an illustration, we have a long history in supporting mobile applications across multiple platforms from third-party developers through our MediaMall, and we look forward to expanding these application choices with our support of the Nokia Ovi Store later this year.
AT&T is an important resource for manufacturers that desire to launch an application store for our customers. We offer distribution, promotion, and a trusted one-click billing relationship with our subscribers. This established billing relationship adds additional ease of use and trust in a third-party app store.
An empty store is by nature, not easy to use, so we are also focused on ease of use for developers, who are now confronted with multiple SDKs for different platforms. AT&T has long been a leader in the developer community, offering software architects knowledge and support on multiple platforms as well as a test environment to ensure beta apps actually perform on the network as designed. We saw the need years ago to help navigate the differences between operating systems, platforms, and chipsets to make developing wireless applications easier. The market’s rapid adoption of the app store and the growth in the number of app stores lets us leverage AT&T’s investment in the developer community and further advance a widespread end user adoption of mobile apps.
Recently, AT&T announced a leadership milestone for smartphones. Twice as many smartphone users have chosen us over any other carrier. This leadership is a result of keeping the customer first when we choose products and technologies. The same commitment will be essential for us to deliver our innovation to those who use it every day.
