Nokia are bad at it, but you might recall the N-Gage that had a services layer that wasn't completely terrible. In Europe the operators usually ran this stuff, at least pre-Apple/Google, and there were a good few companies that existed by selling portals which were white labelled and branded as the operator stores.

These things certainly can be killed in bureaucracy, but the tech issues aren't too bad, especially if you're already sitting on a giant pile of servers and a billing solution for each country. At one point I knew one team running stores for about 20 operators (each country is essentially separate) with less than that in developers, and only a handful of sysadmins, if you can have such a thing.