Two instead of one
Then there's Nokia, which has just blown a decade's worth of investment in Symbian. It's teamed up with Intel for a Linux-based OS, apparently aimed at tablets. It's telling that whereas Apple effortlessly grafted its app store onto iTunes, Nokia separately started a music platform - Comes With Music - and the Ovi app store. Reportedly it's now planning to merge the two. Doh!
Still, Nokia is the only other company outside Apple, Google and RIM and Microsoft with a chance of building some kind of app store business. It's just hard to see how.
The key for telcos in all of this is not to compete head-to-head with the handset app stores.
The first opportunity is that vendors tend to be weak where operators are strongest, which is in local markets. Cellcos should look to work with local developers to get local content out to their customers.
The other business is what Telstra CTO Hugh Bradlow calls the shopping mall approach, which is selling space in a store to app developers and charging them a flat fee rather than taking a commission.
It's basically competing on price with the handset stores, but it's also leveraging the fact that the cellcos are - or should be - closer to the local market.
Unlike the device players, operators also have billing platforms and can actually provide customer support.
It's still early days in the app store game. Operators have plenty to bring to the table. It's time they brought it.