"Time for me to try something new. I've handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I'm onto a new project."

The Problem

Apple's App Store is a mess for small and independent developers. Very few developers are making even a livable wage, and the approval process is a black box.

Let's start with making money. Pinch Media reports that the average iPhone application has netted (for the developer) a grand total of $8,500, and 80% of developers have made less than that. That's not per month - which would be a starting point for a two-person team - but rather total revenue earned.

And as reported a few thousand times, the approval process is a black box. For the most part, developers don't know whether their app will be approved or in what timeframe, making the entire experience a nail-biter.

Should Apple Care?

Well, of course, Apple should care. Apple should be inclusive of its community and encourage small developers to grow and make a living from developing for the iPhone. Apple rightly views the App Store as a competitive advantage and should continue striving to keep its developers in-house.

On the other hand, Apple is not responsible for marketing and selling for its developers. The App Store is a distribution medium, not a marketing and sales platform. Apple has a system in place for enabling customers to quickly and easily purchase and download software for their devices. And it has been a massive success, with over two billion downloads.

The difference, though, is that the apps that Apple needs in the App Store most - gaming and entertainment titles - are getting in. And they are being developed by some of the biggest brands in the world. After all, the iPhone and iPod Touch are, first and foremost, entertainment devices.

Note that these big brands do not face the same problems as the rest of the developer community. Many have contacts deep in Apple, are magically ushered through the review process in a few days and get great placement on Apple's virtual store shelves. Electronic Arts, for example, has no public rejection stories and currently has titles throughout the list of top grossing apps, suggesting that it is in the top 10% for App Store revenue generation.

And so, Joe Hewitt has quit the App Store. It's a great show of unity for small developers, but Apple has clearly linked successful applications to big brands, and those brands continue to clamor for iPhone presence.

Guest author: Elia Freedman is the CEO of Infinity Softworks, the leading provider of software calculators with over 15 million distributed. In its 13-year history, Infinity Softworks has developed applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows, Palm OS and Windows Mobile. Elia writes about tech, mobile and running a business on his blog, eliainsider.com and at Twitter as eliajf.

While Apple uses games from Electronic Arts and the I Am T-Pain app as examples of highly popular applications, these apps also profited from instant name recognition and a built-in fan base. For other apps, getting discovered in the Apps Store is getting increasingly hard as the competition heats up. Besides bringing a rather lackluster version of the genius feature to the App Store, Apple also hasn't made any significant improvements to the app discovery experience in iTunes and the mobile store.

Flickr has organized these third-party apps into a "garden," complete with user favorites, tags, descriptions and screenshots. The App Garden represents a significant evolution from the former "services" section on the user side, and the revamp includes new features for developers, who can now use the Garden as a tool to help users discover their products. Read on for details and a few spotlighted Flickr apps we thought were fun.

"When you click on one of your apps," Pachenko continued, "you will be taken to the owner view of your app page. This page is where you tell the world about your app - provide a description, link to a website, set screenshots, and add tags. When you're ready, change the privacy setting to public. That will make your app visible to other users and allow it to show up in searches."

Now, for end users, here are a few apps we picked from the Garden that we think you might like.

Bubblr Makes Comics

Make comic strips from your or others' Flickr photos with this fun, simple application from Barcelona-based shop Pimpampum. The app allows users to search for photos by user or by tag, string the pics into strips, and add captions, thought bubbles and speech bubbles. Creations can be shared via a user's blog, Delicious or email.

Flickr For Busy People Speeds Up Skimming

This delightful time-saver shows a compact grid of photos uploaded from a user's contacts during given time periods between 30 minutes and 8 hours prior to the current time. Below each user's avatar is the number of photos uploaded, and the avatars can be clicked to display (or hide) an array of thumbnails to quick digestion of the day's pics.

Suggestify Geotags Photos

This app lets users geotag other users' Flickr photos by suggesting a location to the photo's owner. That geotag information is stored with Suggestify until the photo owner approves or rejects the suggestion. If approved, the photo is geotagged and the user who suggested the geotag is credited with a special tag on the photo.

Flogr Turns Flickr Pics Into Photo Blogs

Flogr is a PHP/MySQL-powered photoblog interface that displays a main photo page with EXIF data and Flickr comments, a customizable thumbnails page of a user's recent pictures, a slideshow component, a tag cloud and an about page showing the Flickr user's profile. Users can also determine which photos are displayed by telling Flogr to only include images with certain tags.

Flickriver Surfaces Interesting Photos

This app is focused on delivering a seamless, quick viewing experience with minimal visual distraction. Users can choose to check out interesting photos filtered by user or by group. They can search for photos or simply browse to discover the most interesting photos on a given day. Flickriver also includes a keyboard-operated slideshow mode. Better still, Flickriver offers a dynamic badge for bloggers to showcase their images.

More Than Just Static Text

Over time, e-books on the iPhone will hopefully become more interesting than the current crop of apps. While today's hardware e-readers mimic traditional books, the next generation of e-readers will likely go beyond this and the iPhone is already in a position to lead the charge. Creative's forthcoming Zii MediaBook will offer some of this functionality. With iTunes LP, Apple also has a format that publishers could use to create richer e-book experiences. iTunes LPs aren't compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch, yet. It is likely only a matter of time before Apple brings this format to its mobile devices, though.

Apprupt is a performance analytics shop focusing specifically on iPhone apps. They track the click-thrus and conversion rates for online and mobile links to iPhone applications, and they claim to help developers find the sweet spot where highly focused user targeting meets pure monetization. But how does the end-of-the-rainbow promise hold up?

Clicks, downloads, rates, and revenue are all available from the Apprupt dashboard:

Developers can create links for separate campaigns. Each campaign is tracked individually, and the resulting data can be used - much like the feedback from other typical direct response campaigns - to ditch unsuccessful efforts, adjust budgets to support successful campaigns, and conduct testing on which methods will yield the best results.

Apprupt analytics apply to such media buys as online or mobile media, be they links or banners, as well as social media promotion on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, or blogs. Interestingly enough, app optimization data is offered from Apprupt absolutely free, although premium features may be introduced in the future.

For the time being, Apprupt supports iPhone and iPod Touch apps only, but support for other mobile operating systems is in the works.

It would be nice if Apple gave us a better breakdown of the kinds of apps it actually delivers (free vs. paid, games vs. utilities, etc.). This kind of transparency is obviously not in Apple's DNA, so we depend on data from third-party services like AdMob for this information. According to AdMob, iPod touch and iPhone users are more likely to buy apps than users of any other mobile platform and are also more likely to interact with mobile ads.

For developers, no matter the grumblings about the App Store approval process, the App Store is simply the largest and most lucrative marketplace for their work right now.

Still, if you are looking for free recipe apps launched or updated in the last month, you would have a hard time finding these in iTunes. In uQuery, however, all it takes is two clicks to filter out older or more expensive apps. While search on uQuery is great, however, the service does not (yet?) provide users with a good way to simply browse the store. You can't, for example, just look at all the new games published in the last week that are available for $0.99 or less.

Earlier this year we wrote about App Engine, another web-based alternative to the App Store. App Engine, however, is currently offline. App Engine basically recreated the App Store on the web - including Apple's layout. App Engine is now offline, making uQuery one of the best web-based alternatives to iTunes, though other alternatives like iphonexe.com are also worth a look.

Tip of the hat to AppScout for bringing uQuery to our attention.

Here are a few of the them:

• pump was primed: with the iPod, Apple had already familiarized millions of people with iTunes and the idea of buying music and videos content for their devices on iTunes - moving to applications was a natural next step
• it's not just the iPhone: by creating an ecosystem that both iPhone and iPod touch users can tap into, Apple greatly expanded the reach of its app store. Apple says it has shipped over 40 million devices with the iPhone OS on it. This means that, on average, iPhone and iPod touch owners have downloaded an average of around 38 apps per person, which is not an outrageously high number.
• pricing: allowing free apps into the store and distributing them for free was a very smart move by Apple. This allows new users to become comfortable with the App Store concept and gives developers a chance to showcase free versions of their paid applications and games. Also, by allowing developers to charge as little as $0.99 for an app, developers can reach a lot of users while still getting paid for their work.
• international reach: there are App Stores in 77 countries and very little content is restricted to specific countries
• games: almost every application in the list of top paid and free apps (iTunes link) is a game. The iPhone (and the iPhone 3GS even more so) is a great mobile gaming machine and given that most games are quite cheap, who can really say no to the Moron Test or Real Soccer 2009 (which at $0.99 is quite a bargain)?
• low barrier of entry for developers: you don't have to pay to start developing (assuming you have access to a modern Mac), and if you are already a Mac developer, developing for the iPhone OS is relatively easy, as you use the same tools as before.
• a chance to make money: of course, it also helps that Apple provides a central hub for all the apps and at least gives developers the impression that even small development houses or a guy in his parents' basement is playing on the same level as Electronic Arts or Gameloft.

Some things we would like Apple to change/add:

• improve the approval process: it's no secret that the process to get an application into the store is rather arcane and that Apple regularly refuses to let apps into the store for seemingly random reasons.
• "remember this iPhone app" - our own Marshall Kirkpatrick would really like to see Apple add a way to mark apps in the store so that he could buy them later. This could look something like wish lists on Amazon or Newegg
• recommendations: with 65,000 apps, it's very hard to keep an eye on what's new in the store. As of now, Apple hasn't introduced a 'Genius' feature for the App Store and there isn't even an Amazon-like function "others who bought this app also liked these apps" feature
• mark apps you already bought

Can you think of other reasons why the App Store became such a success? And what would you like Apple to add to it or improve? Let us know in the comments.

Obviously, a game developer won't be able to churn out new applications at the same rate as an eBook publisher. Game developers have, on average, 2.3 apps in the store (looking at data from the last week), while a typical eBook vendor is selling almost 18 apps right now.

Books are also currently the fastest growing category in the App Store (285% in the last three months), mostly because vendors can simply pack different texts into separate applications. Compared to other categories, productivity apps are only growing slowly, though the number of apps in this category still grew 58% over the last 12 weeks.

One-Hit Wonders

Looking only at paid apps, Lorica also found that 6.3% of all sellers have had an application that made it to the App Store's "Top Paid Apps" list, though about 80% of these were one-hit wonders. On average, a top paid app will remain in this list for 13 days.

While the App Store generally gives every developer a chance to showcase their products, for game developers, the picture is a bit less democratic. Here, the top 27 sellers account for 28% of all the apps that appeared in the Top Paid Games list. Puzzle games, by the way, represent 1 in 4 games in the store.

U.S. iTunes App Store: Sellers

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Music Apps / Internet Radio

• Pandora (M)
• Slacker Radio (F) - our review
• Last.fm (R)
• Tuner (P)

News

• New York Times (M,F) - our review of version 2.0
• USA Today (P)

Photo Apps

• Photon (F) - our review
• Pixelpipe (F) - upload your photos to over 70 different photosharing and social media services (we just posted a review of Pixelpipe's new Firefox plugin today)
• Mobile Fotos (P) - browse and upload photos and videos on Flickr
• iview (P) - share photos on Tumblr

Social Networks

• Facebook (P, M)
• Foursquare (P) - our review

Twitter Clients

• Tweetie (M, P)
• Twitterfon (F, R)

E-Books

• Kindle for iPhone (F) - our review
• Stanza (P) - part of our list of seven must-have offline apps

Productivity

• Todo (F) - lots of to-do list apps for the iPhone - this one is $9.99, but worth the money
• Groundwork (R) - access Basecamp from your iPhone
• YouNote (R) - note taking app, but also works with photos, drawings, and audio
• Soonr (F) - access documents from your desktop on the iPhone

Chat / Voip

• Skype (P, F) - our review ("It's Real and It's Spectacular")

Health

• Diamedic (R) - for tracking glucose levels, insulin injections, lab results etc.

What are Your Favorite Apps?

These are the apps that we use every day, but you surely have your own favorites, so feel free to leave a comment and let us know which apps you prefer.

AdMob will allocate ad impressions based on the quantity and quality of the inventory that each member contributes.

Given that developers have relatively few outlets to promote their applications outside of Apple's App Store, this looks like a good way for developers to get the word about their applications out to users. Given that the ads appear in other apps, the targeted users are obviously already interested in downloading iPhone apps.

Was MemoryUp a "Rogue" Application?

Whether or not MemoryUp actually destroyed personal data and spammed people's contacts, as it was said to have done, is unknown. However, it would have been difficult for it to have accomplished those things. The app required no special privileges to install, so it's hard to imagine how it could have accessed the data and email addresses or how it could have sent out the spam. Also, for what it's worth, the company behind the app adamantly denies the claims. Says Robert Lee, chief technical associate for eMobiStudio, "We are very disturbed by these reports. Whatever damage is out there has not been done by our product."

...Or a Victim of Community Backlash?

The truth about this application may be that it just wasn't very good, not that it was dangerous malware. Many comments about the app in the Android store (prior to the app's removal) and in the forums weren't about losing data but about how the app wasn't worth installing because it provided no real value to the user.

What's even more apparent, though, in reading through the posts and comments about MemoryUp, is that many members of the Android community seemed to have a grudge against the app's creator, Peter Liu, whose drive-by advertising in forum postings got under people's skin. "How many times are you going to advertise this on here?" wrote one user. Later, others bragged and joked about running the "Memory folks out of town." "Peter needs to get a life," said yet another user.

It stands to reason that a handful of Android community members decided to disparage the application to get back at the app's developer...but something like that could never be proven, only suspected.

Yet, if that was the case, those people inadvertently ended up hurting Android in the process. By raising questions about the safety and security of Android platform, they helped to spread "FUD" (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about this new mobile OS. Even worse, these rumors make the iPhone's closed and "by approval only" model look like the safer, smarter choice when it comes to phones. But as anyone involved in the open movement will tell you, that is not necessarily the case.

Now, however, thanks to an online version of the App Store which scrapes the content of the store in iTunes, you can quickly browse for applications, read reviews, and see screenshots from any computer that has access to the Internet without ever having to open iTunes.

As Amit Agarwal notes, Apple uses a rather cryptic XML format for delivering the pages in iTunes. However, the developers of the online App Store have found a way to decrypt these XML files and render them as regular HTML.

Limitations

Of course, there are some limitations to this approach. You can't, for example, install apps without using iTunes at some point. The online App Store also doesn't have a search function.

Will Apple Shut it Down?

Of course, given Apple's litigious nature, we don't know if this version of the App Store will be around for a very long time, but it's a great resource if you just want to link to an app in the store, for example, without your users having to open the desktop iTunes app (which, after all, is not available on all operating systems).

There was lots of activity in the digital lifestyle space in 2008, with new devices, services, and platforms being launched and some of our favorites from last year getting significant updates. One notable trend throughout the year was the way these products and services began to converge; not in the sense that they were becoming all-in-one devices, although some of that was happening, but rather by hardware, services, and content playing together nicely, often through open standards and platforms, with the Internet acting as a conduit. On that note, here are our picks of the 10 best digital lifestyle products of 2008.

• Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 International Products of 2008
• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
• Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008

1. The App Store

The real upgrade to the iPhone this year wasn't the iPhone 3G but the accompanying App Store. Launched just five months ago, the store now offers over 10,000 third-party apps, and Apple has seen over 300 million downloads. Part of that success can be attributed to the way in which the iPhone as a platform has galvanized developers; a second major factor is the simplicity of the App Store itself. As a result, lots of our other favorite digital lifestyle-related products and services wound up on the iPhone and iPod Touch, such as Pandora and Last.fm (digital music), Joost (Internet TV), Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter (social web), as well as location-based services, games, remotes (VLC Player and Sonos), and much, much more.

See also: The real surprise of the App Store isn't number of downloads or revenue

2. Netflix

When Netflix starting talking up plans to deliver its online streaming service, Watch Instantly, to "Internet-connected high-definition DVD players, Internet-connected game consoles, and dedicated Internet set-top boxes," we were a little skeptical, especially of the time frame. However, the company really delivered in 2008: Netflix streaming is now available on TiVo, the XBox 360, Internet-connected DVD players from LG and Samsung, along with the Roku Netflix Player set-top box.

3. Android

Our initial review of the first Google phone, T-Mobile's G1, was mixed, but the Android OS had us pretty excited. "Without a doubt, the Android operating system is spectacular," last100's Daniel Langendorf wrote at the time. "It's fast, with little or no lag time. It's responsive, fun to use, and full of promise." A few months on and we're still impressed. In particular, Android's mobile web browser is the best post-iPhone one yet. And likewise, the Android Market does a great job of copying the iPhone's App Store. Of course, the best thing about Android is that it's open source; as a result, we'll see it powering numerous new smartphones next year, along with other hardware, such as set-top boxes, MIDs, and GPS devices.

4. Nokia E71

In our extensive review, we described Nokia's E71 as our favorite smartphone yet. So, admittedly, this one is a very personal choice. The E71 is roughly the same size as the iPhone but has a completely different form-factor, omitting touch for a more traditional user interface and with enough room to pack in a compact but very usable QWERTY keyboard. Other pluses are the device's overall responsiveness, bundled applications, and a number of welcome improvements to the S60 line's user interface, along with decent web browsing and media playback, superb call quality, and extremely good battery life.

5. Hulu

Although online video site Hulu was available in private beta in 2007, it didn't launch publicly until March of this year. Our initial verdict was mixed, but since then the Fox and NBC joint venture has become the third biggest video destination in the U.S., according to Nielsen. Perhaps a testament to that success, a number of device makers have released set-top boxes marketed on their ability to put Hulu content on the TV, such as ZeeVee's recently announced PC-to-TV solution, the ZvBox, and the Neuros LINK. Now, if only Hulu would release an iPhone app or, like Netflix, form official partnerships with consumer electronics companies.

6. BBC iPlayer

Hulu could certainly learn a thing or two from the iPlayer, the BBC's TV catch-up service (UK only). Since its controversial Windows launch, when the public broadcaster was accused of getting too close to Microsoft, the iPlayer has added streaming for the Mac and Linux, a version for the iPhone and iPod Touch, numerous other portable media players, and support for the latest phones running Windows Mobile. There's also an iPlayer application for select Nokia phones and a browser-based version optimized for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii.

7. PlayStation 3

Sony's PlayStation 3 wasn't launched in 2008, but it certainly came of age this year. The company has always pitched the PS3 as a device that goes far beyond gaming. Instead, like Microsoft's XBox 360, it's designed to be a trojan horse in the living room, delivering a range of non-gaming content and services through the television. On that front, Sony made significant progress in 2008 by winning the next-generation format war with Blu-ray, adding DVR functionality in the UK with PlayTV, launching a video download store in the U.S., adding support for DivX video, and, finally, rolling out its own virtual world called Home.

8. Songbird

After being in development for two years, the open-source desktop music player Songbird reached its 1.0 release this month. What sets Songbird apart from the likes of iTunes is the array of available plug-ins that extend the app's functionality. For example, mashTape, one of six default add-ons, let's you delve into artist info, discography, links, and news and scroll through Flickr photos and YouTube videos. Other add-on services that ship with the player out of the box are Last.fm, Concerts, and SHOUTcast radio. With these installed, you can sync your tracks to Last.fm's online service, check out upcoming concerts in the area, and stream music over the Internet using the player. As of publication, there are over 70 plug-ins available for Songbird.

See also: ReadWriteWeb's full Songbird review.

9. Wii Fit

Nintendo has long contended that "everyone's a gamer," and now the console giant wants everyone to get fit. Announced last year but released in 2008, the Wii Fit aims to improve the health of family members through the kind of active play first seen in Wii Sports. The "game" comes with a balance board that assists with aerobic, toning, and balancing activities. A neat feature is that household members can review each other's progress on a new Wii channel.

10. The Netbook

This isn't an individual product but a whole new product category that has really taken off in 2008. Initially targeted to the education market and those wanting a third machine, netbooks are resonating with a much broader market -- and not just because of their lower price point compared to more traditional, higher spec'ed sub-notebooks. Despite years of industry propaganda, consumers are wising up to the fact that they don't have to step on the processor upgrade treadmill. Instead, in an age when more and more of our applications and data reside in the cloud (on remote servers, rather than local computers), a machine with Internet connectivity and powerful enough to run a modern web browser (a netbook, in other words) is often all we need.

There is no doubt that the iPhone led to a trickle-down effect that influenced nearly every aspect of both handset development and the mobile web itself. Every manufacturer is looking for an "iPhone killer," everyone is dong an app store, and web sites themselves are becoming iPhone-friendly. Meanwhile, mobile app developers are reaping the rewards of having a new platform on which they can develop.

This is the fifth in our series of top products of 2008:

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
4. Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008

With the above thoughts in mind, as we look back at the best mobile apps from 2008, we can't help but notice how iPhone apps top the list. Still, we've tried to include apps here that aren't iPhone-only so that we can deliver a truly well-rounded list. If we missed your favorite app (and surely we did - these lists are always subjective), let us know in the comments. Also, please note that we chose not to include games on this list - at this point, that's a whole other category.

1. Twitter

Without a doubt, Twitter is one of the best social networks to use on your mobile device. You can update your status, send replies, and engage in 140-character conversations from the palm of your hand by way of any number of mobile applications or even via SMS (in some countries, that is). However, it's hard to pick a clear winner in the category of best mobile Twitter application. Depending on your platform, there are multiple apps available and everyone has their own personal favorite.

In an informal poll on Twitter and FriendFeed, we saw some applications received more votes than others. Those included Twitterberry, which is the Twitter app for Blackberry it seems, and Tiny Twitter was popular among Windows Mobile users. For the iPhone, things were more complicated. There are several different applications available, but we noticed that TwitterFon and Tweetie got the most votes. Plus, the newer app Tweetsville is worth mentioning, too, as it has been getting a lot of buzz lately.

Earlier this year, we had polled the blogosphere on the same subject and found then that the top mobile app for Twitter was Hahlo. Only a few months later, and so much has changed. It seems that as new Twitter apps are released, mobile Twitter users rush to try them and often end up with a new favorite du jour. What ends up being your favorite app in the long run has a lot to do with personal preference as well as how you user Twitter. Power users may find the apps with more features to be the best, while casual users might prefer a more simplified interface. In the end, what's most telling about this trend to tweet from our mobiles is that it's not about one particular application. Instead, what's important is that nearly everyone is tweeting. That makes Twitter itself the mobile winner, no matter which application you use to interact with it.

Read some of our top Twitter articles from this past year:

How We Use Twitter for Journalism 

The Rise of Twitter as a Platform for Serious Discourse

How To Get Customer Service Via Twitter

2. FFtoGo

Let's face it, we're social media addicts, and this year, no other social network has been discussed quite as much as FriendFeed. Initially, there was concern that FriendFeed was relocating the conversations that used to take place on blogs and moving them elsewhere. The conversation has left the blogosphere, we cried. Not only that, but FriendFeed's stream of updates began to overwhelm even the best of us. It just became so noisy that the service began to lose its original luster after a while. But then things started to change. FriendFeed implemented dupe detection and bloggers (like us!) found ways to integrate it with their commenting mechanisms. When FriendFeed implemented lists in late August, we were sold. FriendFeed finally became more manageable and thus, more fun.

Of course, we didn't want to give up FriendFeed just because we were going to be away from our computers. That's where the mobile application FriendFeedToGo came in. Thanks to developer Benjamin Golub, we were given FFtoGo.com, a mobile interface for FriendFeed that soon became the interface of choice, even over the company's own iPhone version. Needless to say, those at FriendFeed knew a good thing when they saw one and soon swooped up Benjamin to join the rest of the FriendFeeders in downtown Mountain View, California. We couldn't have been more pleased.

3. Google Maps

What's one of the most important applications you need on a mobile phone? Maps! And when it comes down to it, the application of choice is Google Maps. This year, we saw Google launch their own mobile OS, code-named Android, and with it came one of the coolest applications we had yet seen: Google Maps with Street View for Mobile.

In September, Google updated their Google Maps for Mobile application, which brought Street View to non-Android phones including Blackberry and those phones powered by Java. There was only one glaring omission: the iPhone. Thankfully, iPhone owners finally received Street View, too, with the iPhone 2.2. firmware update, released in November. Google also released a mobile app with voice recognition that same month. These developments came much to the relief of iPhone users who had previously worried that Google was going to only release their coolest apps for Android. Thankfully, that wasn't the case.

4. Fring

The popular mobile IM and VOIP service Fring lets you access and interact with your social networks on the go, make free calls, and chat with your friends over IM - what more could you want in a mobile app? The service supports Skype, Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger), Google Talk, ICQ, SIP, Twitter, Yahoo!, and AIM, and all are made available over your phone's internet connection. With the Fring app, you can see who's online, have multiple conversations at once, and even send and receive files with your friends

Fring also launched an Application Programming Interface (API) earlier this year that offers the Fring mobile interface, IM, presence indication, file transfer and other features to developers seeking to build apps in standard server-side languages. Thanks to the fringAPI™, you can access an ever-expanding group of Fring add-ons including ones for Facebook, Gmail Notifier, Vtap Video Streaming, Orkut's Social Network, Yandex Push Email, and more.

Fring has long been a favorite app for iPhone - it was one of the top apps for jailbroken phones prior to the launch of the iPhone SDK. Strangely, though, there was a long delay between the July 11th opening of the iPhone app store and the October 2008 launch of the official Fring iPhone app.

It's also worth noting that Fring isn't an iPhone-only application - it's supported on a large number of handsets from many different carriers. To see if yours is supported go to m.fring.com.

5. Brightkite

Yes, the mobile social network Brightkite includes an iPhone app, but it's much more than a toy for the exclusive club of iPhone owners. The service, a device agnostic, SMS-based application, lets you "check in" at various locations out in the real world and then see who else is there, has been there, and who is nearby. You can check in via text, web,or iPhone, but text is easiest if you're using a traditional cell phone.

After checking in, you can post updates in a Twitter-like fashion and upload photos to your Brightkite-enabled stream, available at a URL in the format of brightkite.com/people/username. The newly launched "Wall" feature makes Brightkite ideal for conferences and live events as it allows anyone to display the live stream of notes, photos, and checkins at any one place in a large, full screen view that can be shown on any monitor, projector, or TV.

Brightkite isn't on this list because it's hugely successful in terms of numbers - it's here because of its potential. There's still some debate as to whether consumers really want new and separate social networks just for the mobile phone. As we noted back in October, no other social network, including those specialized for mobile devices, had even reached 15% adoption. That means Brightkite and others like it still have a way to go before they become a solid part of the new mobile web. However, if any of these apps have a chance for success, it's Brightkite. With the service's Twitter integration and live event niche, they offer something unique.

Brightkite's best competition comes from a similar app called Loopt, also a cross-platform tool. Loopt is popular with iPhone users - it made the list of top iPhone apps this year. We think Loopt's Android version is interesting, too, because it works in the background automatically checking you in as you travel from place to place. However, although Loopt is available on numerous phones and carriers in the U.S., Brightkite works on all phones. Also, whether people want an app with more automated tracking (like Loopt) or more control (like Brightkite) is yet to be seen.

As with any new application, Brightkite is still waiting to achieve critical mass. It's not mainstream yet, but it's definitely worth watching in 2009.

6. Pandora

There are a number of apps for streaming radio from your phone, but Pandora is definitely one of the best. The app is based on the Music Genome Project, an effort to categorize and analyze the details about each song in existence - including its melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics, etc. - in order to help you find more songs that are like the music you like. To do this, you just listen to some music using Pandora and rate your preferences. Pandora then suggests more songs you might enjoy. If you have diverse tastes, you can even create different Pandora channels - like one for upbeat hip-hop songs and one for your love of classical piano, for example.

Pandora's mobile application works on a number of different handsets from both Sprint and AT&T, including, of course, the iPhone.

7. Shazam

We have to give a shout-out to one other music-based application in addition to Pandora: Shazam. This clever mobile application helps you identify the song you're hearing by having you hold up the phone to the source of the music, most often the radio. The app then "listens" to the song and identifies it for you. Shazam is available both on iPhone and Android, as well as other handsets if you happen to live in the UK.

You may be surprised to learn that Shazam wasn't the first application that could identify songs from your phone. Gracenote's MusicID technology has been around for ages, but it didn't have the easy-to-use UI of the Shazam iPhone application. That simplicity combined with the popularity of the iPhone in general, makes Shazam an app worthy of a download...and worthy of its own iPhone commercial, too, it seems.

8. Opera Mini/Mobile

The popular mobile browser from Opera is always one to watch. Having launched a software developers kit (SDK) for widgets this year, there's a chance for this mobile browser to take on the powerhouse that is the iPhone through its freely developed and distributed widgets that run within the company's mobile browser on any number of handsets.

The company is already far ahead of rival Mozilla Firefox, whose mobile browser code-named Fennec is still under development. Meanwhile, Opera's mobile browser is already being shipped on millions of handsets from major mobile manufacturers including HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, and more. The browser is also available for different types of mobile operating systems like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Linux, making it the alternative browser of choice for many handset owners.

There are actually two mobile version of Opera - Opera Mobile for smartphones and Opera Mini for everything else. It's great that even low-end phones, which are all some folks can afford, can now include a better browser thanks to Opera Mini. Meanwhile, with Opera Mobile's features like offline browsing, built-in productivity tools, tabbed browsing, and the above-mentioned widgets, the next-gen mobile web experience is available to a wide range of devices.

However, one place you won't see Opera anytime soon is the iPhone. Although there was some buzz about an Opera iPhone app, if one even exists, it does so in violation of the SDK and would never get app store approval. Widgets would also make it somewhat of a competitor to the App Store itself, and that usually means a reject notice, if history tells us anything. If you ever see Opera on the iPhone, it will most likely be a jailbroken phone. We would still like to see that!

Read More Opera Coverage:

Opera Mobile News (mobile browser for smartphones): Opera Mobile 9.5 Unveiled

Opera Mini News (Opera mobile browser): coverage of both the Opera 4.1 and 4.2 releases

9. NYTimes iPhone App

For mobile news on the go, we're big fans of what the New York Times has done with their iPhone application. This is a great example of what the newspapers of tomorrow can and should look like, if you ask us. You can view the most popular stories of the day or flip through the various sections of the paper with a flip of your finger. Articles are accompanied by full-color photos, too.

Although there are other mobile news applications out there, we've been excited all year about the initiatives that the Times is taking in attempt to stay relevant in today's digital age. For example, in October, the company launched their first API, making them a news broker just as much as they are a newspaper. More recently, they opened up their front page to outside content, an effort that helps blur the lines between news and blogs even further. We think that NY Times sets a great example for other old media companies trying to embrace the internet age...we only hope that it's not too late.

Disclosure: RWW is syndicated by the New York Times.

10. i.TV

The i.TV iPhone/iPod Touch application, lets you view the latest TV and movie schedules from your area right on your mobile device. You can also rate shows, leave reviews, and recommend shows to others. The app was ranked as one of the top apps in the iTunes App Store 2008 list, too, coming in a #3 on the list of free entertainment applications.

i.TV just keeps improving, too. Last month, they added Netflix to the app, which lets you search the Netflix database, manage your queue, and add movies and shows to your instant watch queue for instant streaming on your Windows PC, Xbox 360, Roku box, TiVo® Series3, TiVo HD, or TiVo HD XL digital video recorders and select Blu-Ray players. They also integrated with Wikipedia in order to link to articles about shows, movies, and actors within i.TV. Best of all, it's free.

This app is one of the only ones we listed that's iPhone/iPod Touch-only, but it was worth including because of its simple, straightforward nature and the useful service it provides. i.TV appeals to everyone - even mainstream users, which is probably what makes it so popular. We agree it deserves the success it has received. i.TV has rapidly become one of our most-used apps this year, even worthy of placement on our iPhone's homescreen.

What do you think?

It was certainly hard to narrow down all the mobile web products to just ten, but we hope we provided you with a list of apps that were especially noteworthy this past year. (You can see more of our favorite apps here.) If you think your favorite apps were slighted, please share in the comments. Also, remember we didn't even touch on mobile gaming apps - that's really a different category at this point - but feel free to share those, too.