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Wireless operators in the West could be about to adopt the strategy which NTT DoCoMo in Japan have pursued for a decade - to give applications developers favourable terms on which to sell their products over data networks.

Western operators like Vodafone have a poor track record in selling data services, and this is attributed to the fact that they take too large a share of developers' revenues, neglecting the argument that they should be content with extra revenues which popular applications can generate from the increased use of wireless data networks.

"DoCoMo takes a very modest share of developers' application revenues - say 10 per cent - Western operators take a much larger share, and that drives developers out," David Wood, founder and executive vice president of Symbian, told the recent Wireless 2.0 conference in Bristol.

According to today's New York Times, in the first 10 days after Apple started selling the 3G iPhone, 25m applications were downloads.

This is making wireless operators realise that their tight control over what can be downloaded onto mobile phones is actually hurting their businesses.

Californian VCs have already anticipated a different attitude among operators with $383m invested in companies developing cellphone applications in the last six months.

Google Mobile is working on software to allow anyone using its Android OS to download any application to its phones.

At the moment, for instance, the iPhone only takes Apple-approved applications, while the operators control all the applications which can be used on their networks.

The new idea is to make the smartphone as application-agnostic as the PC, so that anyone, using any phone, on any network, can download any application.

That may sound rampantly anarchistic to the controlling network operators, but that's democracy, and that's what will get data revenues and smart phone sales booming.

Two things which have, as yet, eluded the efforts of the wireless industry.

See also: Mannerisms, the blog of David Manners. Updated twice daily, it's the distinctive, entertaining, authoritative and never dull commentary on the semiconductor industry, from someone who knows. Sign up for the Mannerisms eNewsletter.

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