Yankee Group: OneAPI Pilot Shows Business Issues Still Trump Technology Hurdles in Operator-Developer Partnerships

OneAPI Attempts to Attract Developers Back to Mobile Operators

The GSM Association’s (GSMA’s) OneAPI initiative, announced with some fanfare at Mobile World Congress in 2009, has a role to play in the overall effort to strengthen operator/application developer relationships, an effort that has suddenly reached the top of every operator’s strategic to-do list due to Apple’s and Android’s success with their application stores and their burgeoning mobile application developer ecosystems.

While telecom operators have long worked with developers, their history of collaboration has been marked with friction and general dissatisfaction. A common complaint relates to the “red tape” operators require them to pass through to do business together. These issues include difficult and proprietary APIs, onerous application testing requirements and reviews, and poor commercial models that favor splits on the operator side. Operators now have the reputation that they “just don’t get developers.” Basically, developers do what they do to make money, and right now, there are easier ways to do that than dealing with operators.

Keywords

OneAPI, pilot, Internet, operator, developer

Pages
Publish Date & Author(s)

by Brian Partridge, Vice President
4 pages
October 2010