The last year has seen the rise and rise of the SDK and the Mobile Applications Store (MAS) and now the claimed originator of the concept, Qualcomm, has dusted off BREW.
Apple's success with its Apps Store for the iPhone made other vendors (and operators) sit up and take notice, when it fostered more than 5,000 new applications, garnering $30 million revenues in the first month and generating 200 million downloads in three months.
Off the stocks in quick succession came Android's Market and RIM's Application Center for the Blackberry.
But of course the MAS approach is not a new phenomenon - it's just that Apple seems to have cracked the magic formula for a MAS that really works for developers (and managed to shout loudest about how well it had done).
Way back in 2001 Qualcomm launched a not dissimilar offering for its mobile operating system, BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless), complete with Software Development Kit (DSK) and a distribution channel via operators.
With this formula, the BREW platform has been doing very nicely and now fosters an average of 80 million downloads per month and, according to Andreas Constantinou, Research Director at VisionMobile has garnered over $1 billion in software revenues.
» This story continues on page 2. Please click here to read
please sign in to rate this article
44148