Our take...
A key challenge for any mobile application store is to attract developers.

Various aspects of Orange's latest offering will be welcomed by developers, it offers a simple one-click discovery process, operator billing, a dedicated operator support programme, and various open APIs (application programming interfaces).

A key advantage of the operator run store is the simple billing process, unlike other stores which typically require customers to enter credit card details, register for the shop or register for third party payment solutions such as PayPal.

However there are some key parts of the store which are unlikely to be approved by developers:

1) By maintaining control of the pricing, Orange has marked out a key difference between itself and other store owners. One of the most popular features for developers of stores such as Apple's App Store has been the ability to manage pricing. In an increasingly crowded market, developers have exploited their ability to manage pricing to manipulate sales and chart positions.

2) By limiting the price of applications to a maximum of 9 euros, Orange's store will also fail to attract high quality business and navigation applications which can often retail for up to 100 Euros.

3) Developers are also faced with the problem of fragmentation. Historically, developers have been held back by operators' demand that content should run across as wide a range of their handsets as possible. While developers are not required to create content for each operating system (OS), Orange does demand that any application developed for a specific OS should run on any handset that supports that platform. This is likely to hinder developers as they will be forced to tailor content to older devices that may not allow for the latest high quality features and are likely to be addressed to consumers who are less willing to purchase content.

4) Each of the smartphone OSes supported by Orange's Applications Shop is also served by its own platform or device specific store. While Orange has an advantage in its ability to offer integrated billing it will need to offer more to attract significant numbers of developers and customers.

5) The initial audience of just over 1m customers (in the UK and France) is unlikely to be sufficient to attract a great amount of developer interest. Screen Digest estimates that by end 2010 the active audience for Apple's App Store will be almost 60m, and it is a platform for which developers incur no porting costs at the moment.

To succeed, Orange will need to ensure that it can quickly increase the audience for its store and have it preinstalled on as many handsets as possible – an OTA downloadable store is not sufficient to reach a mass audience.
For the consumer, apart from a greater range of content, it may be difficult differentiate between the new application store and the operator portal that preceded it.