At the AT&T Developer Summit co-located, the carrier probably made a lot of developers happy by rolling out multiple platform APIs which could lead to more powerful apps which are easier to write across all the platforms.
Basically, this gives app makers deeper hooks into the network and its capabilities. The APIs include payments, U-Verse, SMS and MMS, location, device capability and mHealth hooks. AT&T took great pains to make sure that these platform APIs work well with HTML5, which could make it easier for developers to create apps that work for the iPhone, Android and others with minimal tweaking for the individual platform. What this means is that apps can do things like easily integrate into the carrier billing for in-app purchases, use the U-Verse integration for multi-screen entertainment.
After a $99 registration fee, AT&T is giving access to its platform APIs for free throughout the year. There’s no word on how much this will cost after 2012.