The adoption of cross-platform and cloud technologies to “broaden the purview” of apps will be a major topic in the industry in the coming months, Hoojong Kim, SVP of the Global Technology Research Institute at SK Telecom, told Mobile World Daily.

These developments will be accompanied by the increased availability of apps featuring integration with social networking and real time communication services, in place of “standalone” apps which have previously been commonplace.

According to the executive, HTML5 “holds the promise to break the app distribution silos of iOS and Android platforms,” noting that mobile operators are among those supporting the technology.

“However, HTML5 is still far from becoming a replacement for native applications. Therefore, native applications will co-exist where higher performance and deeper access to hardware are required,” he continued.

SK Telecom has its own app store, called T store, which in South Korea  is open to customers of rival operators, with the executive noting that the store has been “recognised to be well-organised and superior to other stores” available in the market. While serving customers of its competitors, he also noted that “the other operator which competes against us in the Korean market submitted some apps in T store, and even use the T store as a channel of marketing and a way of contacting with consumers.”

The company also has T store operations in international markets such as China and Japan, where it does not have an operator business, meaning it had to “change perspective and re-organise the strategies.”

“We have to put a lot of resources and efforts, in the process of marketing and advertising, to distribute the T store to all the mobile handsets,” he concluded.