ReadWriteWeb

HTML5 Web apps are going to become a definitive section of the mobile ecosystem in 2012. The difference between the mobile Web and its native counterparts is that there is no one company seen as the de facto leader of the movement. Apple leads iOS, Google touts Android, Microsoft and Nokia push Windows Phone. The mobile Web? Lots of players, no clear leader.

One company is in the perfect position to take the reigns. What do you think about when you hear terms like "open," "cross-platform," and "standards?" Certainly not Apple. Facebook has the chops to lead the mobile Web but is closed system flies against the open Web community. When it comes to developers, resources, leadership and coding acumen, one company stands ahead of the mobile Web pack. If Mozilla wants it, the mobile Web is there for the taking.

Social gaming platform Zynga takes a lot of flak for its overbearing management practices and obsession with metrics over user experience. While those rumors may or may not be true, there is more to Zynga than calculating sessions lengths and daily average users. In fact, Zynga's Germany branch is one of the global leaders in HTML5 development and creating dynamic mobile Web games. We chatted with Zynga Germany CTO Paul Bakaus about how Zynga approaches HTML5, what are the limitations of the spec and if we will ever see a Facebook app store.

Zynga has a variety of open source HTML5 projects in GitHub along with several new HTML5 game releases, including Words With Friends and Zynga Poker Mobile Web. As many Web-based game developers will tell you, those are not easy to create. See below for our interview with Bakaus and what Zynga is doing to move the HTML5 spec and ecosystem forward.

The rise of the app store has fundamentally changed the concept of software delivery. Gone are the days when zealous software companies sent users discs in the mail (oh, AOL, we remember you well) that ended up making better coasters than promotion. Many computers these days do not even ship with a CD-ROM drive and smartphones have never seen any type of physical downloads. The delivery mechanism of the application store is an often-overlooked revolution of the mobile era.

A Croatian startup named ShoutEm that provides a platform for iOS and Android app creation created a timeline infographic of the history of the mobile app store. Starting in 2008 with the advent of Apple's App Store, the game has fundamentally changed. Check it out below.

App discoverability is one of the biggest problems facing mobile publishers these days. That is especially true for HTML5 developers publishing apps to the mobile Web. A San Francisco-based startup wants to help. Appstores.com today is announcing the launch of a mobile app distribution network to help developers make their apps more discoverable and profitable.

Android is making some big news at the end of the year. The platform is seeing a billion app downloads a month, it controls nearly 50% of the smartphone market, new devices are being released every week and Ice Cream Sandwich is starting to make its way into the hands of consumers. With everything Android has going for it, you would think it was the No. 1 choice of app developers, right?

Not so fast. Mobile analytics company Flurry shows that new projects by developers are still dominated by iOS. Google chairman Eric Schmidt said last week that developers would be making apps for Android first by the middle of 2012. If that is going to be the case, the platform has a lot of catching up to do.

The barrier for entry for creating software for computing devices has never been lower. This has a lot to do with the mobile revolution. According to a report from VisionMobile, the time to market for applications has decreased from 82 days through traditional channels to 36 days with the advent of the app store. Developers have more reasons to publish to apps stores now than ever before, with curation, distribution, billing and monetization, discovery and feedback opportunities from users higher than ever.

There are several kinds of mobile developers. There are independent software vendors, contractors, hobbyists, moonlighting engineers, entrepreneurs, in-house and B2B/B2C focused developers. The strength a given mobile platform has much to do with how many quality developers it can attract to it.

Mobile analytics company Flurry estimates that application downloads to Android and iOS will hit 25 billion in 2011. That is a 300% jump from 2010, when six billion were downloaded. Of those 25 billion, five billion are expected to come in December as consumers buy new smartphones and start downloading to satisfy their insatiable hunger for mobile goodness.

Smartphones have hit an inflection point. It is not the one we are waiting for quite yet (when 50% of all U.S. consumers have smartphones) but growth like this happens when critical mass of adoption has been realized and a behavior once reserved for early adopters becomes the cultural norm.

In terms of pure volume, the Android Market is rapidly catching up with the Apple App Store. Android has also been a step behind Apple. The iPhone was released in 2007, Android made its mass market debut in 2008. Apple just released iOS 5 while Android just put out version 4.0. From the application perspective, Apple has long maintained a large lead.

Mobile research firm Research2Guidance said in August that the Android Market would catch the App Store by the end of 2011. Today it released its September 2011 numbers to show that the Market has achieved half a million successful app submissions, compared to near 600,000 for Apple. Yet, even though an app has been published, that does not mean it stays in the store forever. Apple still has the advantage in application churn rate over Android.

Verizon is making a concerted effort to bring its enterprise mobility and unified communications options up to industry standards. In the past, Verizon has been criticized as taking a scattershot and sometimes shoddy approach at enterprise solutions and falling short of expectations. Verizon executives know this and are trying to change.

This week at CTIA in San Diego, Verizon unveiled two new enterprise solutions - a private corporate application store and a mobile unified communications client that are intended to take some of the lay-hanging fruit enterprise options and help tie Verizon's enterprise efforts together.

Today, the culmination of a summer of speculation and hype comes to an end. Amazon has announced its tablet, the Kindle Fire. It is a 7-inch little beast priced at $199 that will integrate all of Amazon's media properties and retail channels into a device that the company will push hard through the holiday season. With that comes the Amazon Android Appstore and the ability to tap into Amazon's resources to push premium apps to the Kindle Fire.

The Kindle Fire is going to be popular. So, what does this mean for the Amazon Appstore vis-à-vis the Android Market? Can Amazon overcome its ugly recent history with Android developers and create a go-to market to place premium apps? That is the subject of today's ReadWriteMobile poll.