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ajor telecommunications firms in the country are trying their luck to cash in more from the country'€™s growing number of smartphone users by developing application stores, eyeing customers that are hungry for games and other online apps.

Telcos PT Telkomsel, PT Indosat and PT XL Axiata are three of the country'€™s telecommunications operators getting ready for war in the app world.

Launching brand-new app store i-Aplikazone on Wednesday, Indosat hopes to see growing data revenues from in-app downloads on the store.

'€œWith people using i-Aplikazone, revenue from data users is expected to increase ['€¦]. We'€™re targeting to have all of our customers who use smartphones download the app,'€ said Indosat president director Alexander Rusli.

Indosat has a total of 66.5 million subscribers as of the first quarter of this year, of which 30 percent are smartphone users.

While refusing to disclose any specific revenue targets from the Android-based app store, Alexander said during the launch that his firm expected the new app store to become a reason for its feature phone-based subscribers to migrate to using smartphones, resulting in higher data use in the future.

Indosat has previously targeted seeing its data traffic grow by more than 50 percent this year, given major completion of its network modernization.

Data and value-added services (VAS) significantly contributed to the firm'€™s growing cellular revenues last year, according to the firm'€™s report.

Revenues from VAS, which include game and content packages, surged by 50.9 percent last year, the report has shown.

Indosat'€™s content and VAS division head Hesti Diyahanita Priamsari said that most apps on i-Aplikazone would be free for now, with some in-apps being sold for between Rp 2,000 (15.2 US cents) and Rp 12,000.

The app store currently has more than 10,000 applications, of which over 1,000 are already in Indonesian.

'€œWe aim to encourage more local developers to join so that we'€™ll see more local apps in our store,'€ Hesti said, adding that the app store would be available for BlackBerry before Idul Fitri and for iOS and Windows Phone around the end of the year.

XL, which launched app store Gudang Aplikasi in April last year, stated in its quarterly financial report that the store had already netted 2.3 million registered users during the January-March period of this year.

Growing exponentially, the app store has no fewer than 22,000 applications available for download at present.

XL CEO Dian Siswarini said previously that XL would continue developing its app store because content was as important as devices.

'€œContent is, in fact, one of the main reasons for consumers to use mobile broadband services,'€ she said.

XL'€™s data traffic grew by 92 percent year-on-year (yoy) in the first quarter of this year, compared to the same period last year with total data users at 28.2 million or 54 percent of the total base, according to XL'€™s info memo.

Telkomsel, which is the cellular business arm of state-owned telecommunications giant PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom), took the earliest step, launching TemanDev in August 2013.

Indonesia'€™s telecommunications players are expanding into data, Internet and IT services as revenues from cellular voice and SMS services have been growing flat in the country, where SIM card penetration has hit over 100 percent.