Japanese mobile market leader NTT Docomo is reportedly planning to launch an Apple-style App Store for its i-mode customers in an effort to defend its position against SoftBank, Japan’s exclusive iPhone operator. According to a Financial Times report, Docomo CEO Ryuji Yamada (pictured) says the operator is planning to offer the new platform to its 50 million+ i-mode subscribers. The report notes that the plan marks a shift from Docomo’s existing practice of strictly controlling what applications and services are offered to its i-mode subscribers, which are deemed to be some of the heaviest mobile data users in the Japanese market. “We feel the best advantage of the smartphone is its open application platform, so we want to incorporate that open application environment to the [mass market] i-mode handsets as well,” Yamada told the newspaper. Docomo currently charges a commission on the revenues generated by content providers from i-mode services of 9 percent, but the revenue share for applications offered through its new market would be “somewhat higher”, Yamada added.

The move is seen as a response to the success of the iPhone in Japan, which – despite the perception that the country’s huge mobile market is hostile to foreign brands – has managed to gain 4 percent of the Japanese mobile market. According to earlier reports, SoftBank sold 1.7 million iPhones in Japan, or 72 percent of all smartphones sold, in the fiscal year ended 31 March. The subsequent release of the iPad and iPhone 4 has helped SoftBank further increase its market share at the expense of Docomo, today’s report adds. “The threat is that Docomo customers will value that [App Store] experience so highly they churn and go to SoftBank,” said Charles Golvin, a mobile analyst at Forrester. SoftBank added another 229,500 total new subscribers in June, easily outstripping the 164,000 reported by the country’s biggest provider, NTT DoCoMo, with second-ranked KDDI’s 61,300 new subscriptions a very distant third.