BARCELONA, Spain — AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson on Tuesday expressed frustration with the way applications are sold to smartphone users, saying customers should be able to buy an application once and have it work across different devices.
As an alternative to today’s most popular application stores, controlled by Silicon Valley heavyweights Apple and Google, Stephenson touted an emerging system that lets carriers such as AT&T sell apps directly to users. AT&T was until last week the sole U.S. carrier for the iPhone, whose apps run only on Apple devices.
“You purchase an app for one operating system, and if you want it on another device or platform, you have to buy it again,” Stephenson said in a keynote speech at the world’s largest mobile- phone trade show. Stephenson highlighted a new standard for Web software, HTML 5, which will allow applications to run on different devices.
Carriers have sold simple applications such as games directly to users for a long time, but it’s a small business compared with Apple’s App Store and copycats such as Google’s Android Market. The Associated Press
