While there certainly is no shortage of smartphones in the country, a lot of peeps are missing out on large amount of the experience by not being able to buy and download paid apps. There’s a multitude of reasons for this, but the most apparent is the lack of a viable payment gateway – while the penetration rate of mobile devices in the Philippines is almost close to 90%, only a couple of million actually own credit cards which is the preferred payment method of a number of app stores (BlackBerry, Android). That’s probably the reason why Globe saw the need for their MyAppsMall service that was unveiled last night at an event in Makati.
The MyAppsMall is a collaboration between Globe and Singtel, and is basically an app store of sorts for Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Java. The site allows people to pay for apps via their credit cards, post paid accounts and through their pre-paid load. At first we thought it was just a payment portal that goes in between the app stores that facilitates payment, but apparently it’s like a whole new app store which houses a number of apps from all the ecosystems that we mentioned earlier. Naturally we asked Globe if they were shooting for a 1:1 presence of apps on the different app stores on their service and while that would be the ideal set-up, space and licensing constraints prevent that from happening. Instead, Globe is collaborating and picking apps to put in the store, which users can then download as APKs (if you’re on Android) to their device. Sorry Apple fans, due to the way iOS is set-up (walled garden and all that jazz) iOS devices are out of luck.
If you’re keen on trying it out, you can head over to their site at apps.globe.com.ph or if you’re reading this on your mobile device, you can point your wee little browser over to m.apps.globe.com.ph.