Announced at MWC was yet another partnership between the world’s cellular carriers that will end up resulting in, well, very little. Networks around the world have banded together to create the Wholesale Applications Community, which in essence will be a global cross-platform app effort. And here’s why it’s going to fail: manufacturers, particularly the ones that are invested in an operating system (such as Apple, Palm, and Nokia), will have no interest in participating. Especially those that have created an app store, Apple in particular.

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) will end as a failure, at best withering away as a token gesture to interoperability. There are a million political reasons why it won’t work, but the biggest hurdles to overcome are the technical ones: programming languages and APIs. While we can see feature phone manufacturers rallying around the WAC, nobody buys a T9 flip phone to run apps. They lack the hardware to properly execute – that’s why they’re feature phones.

App developers too aren’t interested in feature phones, because the meager hardware will limit what they can do. Not to mention the varying screen sizes, processors, radios, keypads, and everything else. App developers are interested in smartphones, and that’s where the WAC starts to fall apart.

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Agile Mobile recently unveiled a preview of an app they’re working on: Agile Messenger for Palm Pre. While the fact that messaging apps are on the way for the Pre is no surprise, the feature list that Agile claims for their app is surprising. We’re talking push-to-talk walkie talkie functionality, voice messages, and video messaging. And Agile Messenger is to support Google Talk, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and ICQ chat.

There are three options that we can think of to explain this delicious oddness:

• Agile is making stuff up or confused about the current capabilities of webOS. Not likely.
• Agile has invested big time in their own programming to build the framework for audio and video recording and messaging. Also not likely.
• Agile has been working closely with Palm and the new features in Agile Messenger will be enabled by a coming updated to webOS and the Mojo SDK. More likely than the above.

We have no idea when Agile Messenger for Palm Pre will land, as all Agile is saying is “soon.” Currently Agile Mobile has released messaging applications iPhone, S60, J2ME, and Windows Mobile. Looking at these other apps, we can now throw some cooling water on the fiery embers of anticipation: Agile lists the exact same feature set with the exact same wording for all versions of its software.

Will Palm bring video recording and a microphone-enabled SDK to support Agile messenger’s promise capabilities? Yes, eventually, but we wouldn’t be too optimistic that it’s going to be “soon.” Though we would love to be proven wrong. Nudge nudge, wink wink.

Thanks to Azthel for the tip!

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You may have noticed that the Trapster app is no longer available in the App Catalog. This is not a case of Palm exerting some sort of heavy hand in the approval/denial/removal of apps. As it would turn out, Trapster the company was not prepared and Trapster the app was not as ready as they thought. The following message greets visitors to Trapster’s webOS app page:

“Important announcement: The webOS app that was previously posted has some serious issues that did not show up until a large number of users tried to use the app simultaneously. We were forced to shut off the app. We have already fixed the problem, but some additional issues were uncovered in testing. We hope to have an update posted this week. We are very sorry about the trouble. Thank you for your patience.”

We’ll admit that webOS is a new world for many programmers, but for a company with as large a userbase as Trapster it is surprising that glaring issues were not uncovered during testing. For perspective, Trapster claims the #42 spot of all-time most downloaded iPhone apps and 1,810,712 users worldwide across six smartphone platforms (Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, J2ME, webOS, and Windows Mobile).

This is why we like to advocate large-scale beta testing. There are multiple venues for distributing a beta app for testing *cough* PreCentral Homebrew Gallery *cough* that the average Pre user won’t readily access. Those that do you can trust to have a higher degree of technical knowledge, not to mention patience with the understanding that what you’re testing is an unfinished product. Plus they’re your most dedicated future customers and the type of people that will voraciously promote your app to other users (assuming it’s any good). Beta testing is a risk, we’ll admit that, but the benefits of early exposure, promotion, and bug fixes cannot be underestimated.

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