EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: The head of the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) believes the initiative is well placed to serve both the smartphone and feature phone sectors as it attempts to claw market share from rival app store offerings. Speaking to Mobile World Live in a video interview published today, WAC chief executive Peters Suh claims “WAC offers a solution to both markets… You have our web application solutions which is cross-OS, cross-device, and that’s well suited for the feature phone as well as some smartphone solutions. WAC 2.0 and 3.0 we think are well positioned for the smartphone market.” At last month’s Mobile World Congress WAC released version 2.0 of its spec and promised version 3.0 – supporting in-app billing and user identification – this September. “We think we have a cross-mix of solutions that are valuable to the developer community on the whole,” added Suh.

The ability for developers to be able to support not only the high-end smartphone market but also the huge feature phone space could help give WAC an edge over smartphone-specific stores such as Apple’s App Store. Google’s Android Market is also still primarily focused on smartphones (albeit Android Market is being incorporated across ‘mid-tier’ smartphones as well as high-end devices). WAC’s efforts in the feature phone space will likely see it compete with existing Java- or Brew-based software, as well as operator-owned stores. WAC already claims to have 12,000 apps available in total. View the full video here.