China Unicom to launch app store in November

An already overcrowded app store market will have to make room for yet another shop front next month as second placed Chinese carrier China Unicom prepares to open the doors to its offering.

The Wostore is already available in beta format and has around 2,000 apps available. But come early November, Unicom will start pushing its app store officially in a bid to catch up with local rivals including China Mobile and the ever present threat of the handset vendor offerings.

Leading carrier China Mobile launched its own app store, Mobile Market, last year and already has over 20,000 apps available. China Telecom also has its own shop front as does handset vendor Motorola. Android has yet to stage an official presence in China – China Mobile’s own flavour of the Google OS is called OPhone and is supported by Lenovo, HTC and LG as well as Samsung – and despite Unicom carrying the iPhone, the Apple App Store has no presence in the market.

China Unicom however, is also one of the members of the relatively new Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), the alliance designed to build an open platform for delivering applications to all mobile phone users.

WAC’s 1.0 specification is based upon JIL 1.2.2 and carries on the work of the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) – an older but similar initiative, which was subsumed by the WAC in February. China Mobile was one of the founding members of JIL.

Unicom is the country’s second placed carrier with 161.8 million users at the end of September, while China Mobile leads the pack with 570 million and China Telecom brings up the rear with 83.6 million.