Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group, said he wondered whether Cisco could fully support a robust developer community to provide business-related apps to be used by for the AppHQ storefront.

Fontana said Cisco will be able to foster such a developer community, partly because it will open the Application Programming Interfaces needed to work with Cisco collaboration software. Cisco will also set up a method for independent developers to offer their products inside of AppHQ for a share of the sales proceeds, Fontana said. The amount developers will receive has not been announced.

Verizon Communications has deployed the Cius to its collaboration sales teams and could sell some of the apps its internal developers build to Verizon's partners from inside the AppHQ, said Verizon's Chris Kemmerer, director of mobility solutions.

Larry Michalewicz, a Cisco developer, will help foster Android developer involvement with AppHQ because Cisco will take a "hands-on approach and show them that AppHQ gives them a small in-road to enterprise apps that they may not have.

Despite some earlier reports, the Cius will be released with Android 2.2 and will skip over the upgrade to Android 3.0 also known as Honeycomb, said Tom Puorro, senior director of product management for collaboration. Instead of Honeycomb, Cisco will wait for Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, which is a combined smartphone and tablet OS that plans to have ready this fall.