Feature phones still lead smartphones by a country light-year in the global cell phone market. Their preponderance comes form their popularity in emerging markets. While a lot of the modern feature phones possess decent internet capabilities, they lack dedicated online application marketplaces.

Microsoft has launched OneApp, a cross platform app store, to deliver apps to the wide gamut of feature phones in emerging markets. Considering the limited hardware resources associated with most feature phones, the apps will be built using web development technologies like Javascript and XML, allowing them to be compatible with “70-80 percent” of all feature phones on the market.

The OneApp executable is very light (only 150 kilobytes) as it uses cloud-based resources. It has already been rolled out to Blue Label Telecoms subscribers in South Africa. Microsoft plans to launch OneApp in other parts of the world next year, along with the official SDK.

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