HTC hiring for Sense app store

A leak today has uncovered details of what may be HTC's plans to launch its own app store as a response to the iPhone. Two contacts claimed the company was recruiting content editors to manage both app and e-book sections for a store, including periodicals. Just a few at HTC's Taiwan headquarters would handle tasks at first, the Financial Times was told, but it would eventually expand to about 100 workers abroad.

The shop should tie into the current HTCSense.com service, which so far ties mostly into online backup and map sharing features. HTC had already landed a deal in September with Canada's Kobo to offer its e-book store on smartphones and other devices, but the new positions will cover more than just the Kobo deal.

Publicly, HTC chief Peter Chou has dismissed the need for his company to get into an app store, but he has also expressed concern that HTC needed to go beyond the Sense UI that has defined its Android phones so far. Despite criticisms of delayed upgrades and often complicated interfaces, HTC and other Android manufacturers have insisted on differentiating their phones from the stock Google platform and lately have turned to their own curated stores to copy the Apple model. To date, these have usually been subsets of the Android Market catalog.

The company has been considered the most important Android phone maker so far, but its prominence is being rapidly overtaken by a still-growing Samsung both in general phone sales and in smartphones. The Korean rival expects to ship predicting [reg. required] that it will ship 8.5 million phones in the fall.

By Electronista Staff