Last week Apple announced their AppStore had reached the number of 500 million application downloads. This is a really impressive accomplishment, even more because Apple launched this service at a time when most people were claiming that web applications were the only way to go on mobile, something I can't simply agree with because it depends a lot on what you are developing.

Following Apple's footsteps, Google launched the Android App Market - which appears to be evolving a bit slower than expected - and there have been lots of rumors about others creating similar services for Windows Mobile, etc.

What I'd like to see though is providers enabling m-payments through their AppStores. Like for example being able to pay for an Evernote subscription through my Apple iTunes account without needing to provide any credit card information to Evernote Corp.

The flow I see is my downloading Evernote and the application asking me if I'd like to subscribe to a premium account. By acknowledging it, an iPhoneOS billing wizard should popup, allowing me to authorize the service to charge my iTunes account for a yearly subscription of the service. This flow should also apply to Android or any other mobile devices that provide access to such services.

With this, 3rd party developers should be able to avoid splitting revenue with mobile operators who, on average, keep 50% of the charged value: say you charge $1 USD for a virtual gift on your customer's phone bill. In this case the operator will keep $0.5 USD and you'll get the remaining 50c.

Knowing that Apple, Google, etc. all have activation processes in place that require use of a credit card I think it should be relatively easy to experiment with this concept, what do you think?