Featuring a new service layer, the new Open Mobile API Release 2 enhances the current transport API to provide a more intuitive interface and increasingly powerful functionality to make it easier for developers to connect their applications to the Secure Element within todays feature phones and smartphones.
By choosing to implement the Open Mobile API, handset manufacturers will be able to enrich their application portfolios through the introduction of a host of mobile services that demand the highest levels of security and identity protection afforded by the Secure Element.
For developers this common API eliminates the need to reengineer applications to each specific device by delivering a single, consistent specification and interface across multiple operating systems. By making the move, application developers will be able to manage costs, and reduce time to market and revenue.
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The SIMalliance Open Mobile API Specification describes how a mobile application running on an open smartphone operating system can access a SIM/USIM or any Secure Element. Release 1 .02 of the specification contains the handling of a transport layer that gives applications the possibility to transmit APDUs to Secure Elements.  >>

The security challenges we’ll see in this second decade of the 21st Century, will directly impact mobile’s ability to structurally change consumer’s lifestyles, will cause reputational issues for brands and perhaps more crucially, will mean that fewer services are used…and that means less money to go around the value chain. This paper highlights the need for a change in how security is approached on the connected mobile device. It focuses on the need to create security (and security policy) at the development stage, and highlights the telecoms industry’s unique position of already having a solution to the problem. It discusses why ‘buy in’ is needed from the application development and operating systems communities, and introduces the SIMalliance’s new Open Mobile API workgroup whose task it is to connect the application, operating system and the operator with the Secure Element found in billions of connected devices right across the world.  >>