24 of the world’s largest cell phone companies have joined forces to fight Apple’s domination of cell phone applications. The consortium is made up of big names like Sprint, Vodafone and China Mobile. The Wholesale Applications Community announced its intentions last week in Barcelona, Spain, at the Mobile World Congress.

Consortium formed to battle Apple

Apps are a definite cash cow. Spending is set to explode to $6.2 billion this year, with total downloads rising to 4.5 billion, up from 2.5 billion last year. It’s no small wonder that cell phone providers want to share in some of this wealth.

The cell phone application developers face the problem of too many platforms. The consortium hopes to offer developers a way around this problem. The benefit for the consumer is that it will encourage the developers to make more apps available across a variety of platforms.

How will it affect Apple? The benefit will be for the other platforms and the consumers. Apple is so big that it probably won’t even be a blip on their radar screen. But hey! I’m all for free enterprise! Let’s encourage those developers. And we all know the best persuasion is money.