ReadWriteMobile

Developers looking to reach the mobile audience (and who isn't these days?) have to determine which mobile platforms to code for, which ones to skip and how to approach the design for their mobile website itself.

But before even getting started, there's one question many small companies have to face: which do you build first? Do you build the mobile website before or after building a mobile application, be it for Android, iPhone, Blackberry or whatever platform you want to reach? Or would you be better off starting with an app?

At this week's developer conference, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse announced a new service for Sprint customers: a mobile payment solution called Sprint Mobile Wallet. The system will come pre-loaded on new Sprint handsets and will be made available for download from "Sprint Zone," a pre-installed app featuring news, tips, tricks and a curated collection of Sprint's favorite apps.

What's unique about the Mobile Wallet solution is that it will allow customers to pay for both digital and physical goods using their phones. And for developers, noted Hesse, the app provides a new way to monetize mobile applications.

TestFlight is a new tool for mobile developers which is being billed as an application that fixes the somewhat painful process of beta testing iOS 4 (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) applications. And it does so without requiring the use of iTunes, manual syncing, private APIs (application programming interfaces) or jailbreaking.

Is that even possible?

This weekend, at the Boston jQuery conference, the alpha release of jQuery Mobile went live. As the name implies, the project is a user interface framework for mobile devices built on top of jQuery, the most popular JavaScript library used today. With jQuery Mobile, developers can write applications for a number of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets.

Although still very experimental in its current state, the new technology may have a major impact on mobile Web development going forward.

Mobile developers looking to monetize free applications should pay special attention to a new report from mobile analytics firm Flurry. According to this study, conducted using a sample of leading iOS applications with a combined reach of 2.2 million users, in-app purchases have taken over as the leading source of revenue for social networking and social gaming applications.

New data from Nielsen out today delves into the behavior of the youngest mobile consumers: the American teenager. The study further solidifies what we've known for some time - teens are heavy-duty users of text messaging services. No other demographic group texts as much as teens do, with an average of 3,339 texts sent and received per month. (For girls, it's even higher - 4,050 texts per month!)

But the study also revealed that teens are now turning to mobile applications, too, with 38% of teens using downloadable apps like those from Facebook, Pandora and YouTube. And usage in this area is growing, says Nielsen.

Among smartphone users, Apple iPhone fans often poke fun at Android users for having to put up with so-called mobile "crapware," the pre-installed applications that come on new Android smartphones. Mobile carriers have taken to pre-loading their phones with apps for their own services, or those from third-party developers. For some users, this bloat is made doubly worse as the apps can't be uninstalled.

But not all "crapware" is bad. In fact, most consumers even like it. Case in point of bloatware we might not mind: Amazon's Kindle mobile application is now going to be pre-installed on Verizon's Android phones.

There are some 225,000 mobile applications for the iPhone now and 70,000 for Android, so every so often we like to highlight a few that have caught our attention. This latest edition of our favorite smartphone apps includes a few in testing, a few we're madly in love with, some notable updates and some you may not have even heard of yet.

Consumers will have downloaded 25 billion mobile applications by 2015, a trend which prompted technology mag Wired to ponder in August if the open Web is dead. But don't be fooled by these reports, says Adobe. In its new mobile consumer study the company found that while apps are popular, people often prefer the mobile Web.

Earlier this week, Apple announced it was rolling back previous restrictions on the use of third-party development tools for building applications for the iOS mobile operating system and that it would be, for the first time ever, publishing its once-secret "App Store Guidelines" for all to read. These guidelines explain, in detail, how Apple determines which apps are granted acceptance into its ever-growing iTunes Application Store, now home to around 250,000 mobile apps.

Some of the language in the developer agreement is rather strong and very direct. For example, Apple proclaims that it has "lots of serious developers who don't want their quality apps to be surrounded by amateur hour."

Apple also says: "we don't need any more Fart apps," but it couldn't be more wrong about that, and here's why.