Today, Orange in Europe launched Orange Partner Connect, a “one-stop shop” for developers to submit apps to the operator’s own country-specific app stores. The move is a sign of how mobile operators are still chipping away at the mobile apps business model, looking for opportunities to make money out of this area. But if app stores are an arms race – a debatable point – could it be that operators have already lost this one?
The service is Orange’s way of pumping a bit of life into its own app store effort. It launched one year ago with 5,000 apps, with plans to add about 200,000 widgets from Netvibes some three months later. But Orange has otherwise made very little noise about how well the app store is working.
Orange says that Partner Connect will let developers submit apps to stores once, accessing customers across its footprint, which extends across Europe and into Africa. Confusingly, elsewhere on the Partner site, Orange says that the only Orange app stores currently in operation are in the UK and France.
Initially Connect will only support Android-based apps. The plan is to extend that also to BlackBerry and Java soon (no mention of Symbian, Windows or Apple’s iOS).
The apps will be sold on a 70/30 split, with developers getting the bigger share. The aim is to get the first apps out of Connect and into the stores by January 2011.

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