ReadWriteWeb

The Android Market has hit 10 billion downloads and to celebrate Google is making apps available for a dime. The Market's editors have chosen 10 apps to put on sale for $0.10 and several of them have graced ReadWriteWeb's mobile apps of the month columns in 2011.

There is something appealing about a discounted app made available for cheap or for free. Amazon does it every day in its Appstore and downloads of paid apps available for free tend to skyrocket more than a if the app was available for free anyway. Everybody loves a deal. Check out the list of 10-cent apps below.

HTML5 is fundamentally changing the way developers approach the Web. Whether it is for desktop browsers or mobile, the language and standards of the future are not some distant point on the horizon. It is right now.

In the mobile realm, the debate rages on: Web or Native? The difference between the two is beginning to blur as HTML5 standards evolve. We examine what happened in HTML5 in this year in our third installment of 2011's top trends. Check out the rest of the series, starting with John Paul Titlow's music trends and Alicia Eler's mobile commerce trends.

This week, darling of the all-you-can-stream music space Spotify announced that it's opening up to third party developers and creating a platform on which they can build HTML5 apps to run within its desktop client. Once approved by Spotify, those apps will be available to users from the service's new "App Finder" button. They've also added a new home screen that show's what music is trending among one's friends, as well as an improved social experience all around.

The new features are not yet included in the Spotify desktop client, but curious users can download a preview of the next version of the software. We did and after using it, we're finding that the inclusion of third party apps makes Spotify much better.

A new study from research2guidance shows that the market for apps is continually moving toward segmentation and niche stores. The Apple app store, which launched in July 2008, has contributed significantly to the rise of niche apps. The study defines three types of niche stores: Platform-oriented (apps for a specific OS platform such as AndroidPIT or Crackberry a.k.a. BlackBerry), target group-oriented (apps for a segment of users, such as business, adults, kids) and carve outs (mobile network operator with its own app store in the Android Market or something like "@work" by Apple).

Looking back on 2011, it may be remembered as The Year Of Mobile. Sure, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and all the other platforms existed in previous years but historians will look back at 2011 and say that it was the year that the way an entire populace interacts with information fundamentally changed. Mobile is not just for the early adopters anymore. Smartphones are everywhere.

What made waves in the mobile realm this year? We take a look in our third installment of ReadWriteWeb's top products of the year. Our founder Richard MacManus kicked us off with social products and Jon Mitchell took a look at web-based consumer products. To make the mobile list, a product had to be built to fundamentally work inside mobile platforms, hence the platforms themselves (iOS, Android flavors etc.) do not make the list. Take a look at our list below and let us know what we may have missed in the comments.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) and CTIA, a cellular trade association, announced a rating program for mobile apps that will be instituted by a variety of partners in the near future. Just as video games have ratings from the ESRB, now too will mobile apps.

The app stores for the major U.S. carriers in AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular and Verizon are on board, as is Microsoft. We will see how far the rating system takes off without recognition from the two big gatekeepers, Apple and Google. Do apps really need to be rated or is it another example of the Nanny State making sure that everything is labeled and politically correct?

The team at Socialize has released a new action bar that centralizes the user interface of its mobile engagement platform. Developers can now drop the Socialize SDK into their app and create an bar where users can interact within the app through Facebook, email, text and Twitter and also use in-app commenting.

The new action bar can either be a stand-alone feature within an app or developers can strip the UI from the bar itself and just place the functionality of the action bar within an app. As the Socialize SDK is open source, developers can add the social engagement layer that the startup provides in whatever way they want. This is a significant step for the startup but the team has more up its sleeves coming soon.

Yesterday's story about the iOS developer who exploited a security vulnerability ostensibly to bring it to Apple's attention created some passionate debate within the ReadWriteWeb virtual offices. Should he be lauded for his fierce efforts to get Apple's attention? Should he have been removed (as he was) from the Developer Program? What do you think?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+, Twitter, the original post and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Internet privacy solutions provider TRUSTe is concerned that mobile apps do not have built-in privacy solutions. TRUSTe claims that 77% of all mobile applications lack privacy policies that can allow users to decide how they want to share data third parties. As such, TRUSTe is coming out with a free privacy policy for mobile developers later this month.

Essentially what TRUSTe is coming out with is a privacy policy wizard or starter kit for mobile developers that do not have policies in place for their apps. Developers are led through a set of questions defining what their apps do and do not do in terms of privacy and at the end of the quiz, TRUSTe gives them a line of code that links to the apps privacy policy. The free version does not give a developer a certified TRUSTe privacy seal and there is potential for abuse of the system by creating a privacy policy with an app that does not follow those guidelines.

The Pew Internet and American Life project released details of a new survey today showing the trends in how U.S. adults download apps to the smartphones and tablets. Including those that have downloaded and app or have apps preloaded to their devices, about 50% of all U.S. cellphone users have an app on their devices. That correlates to about 42% of all U.S. adults.

The amount of U.S. cellphone users that have apps on their devices rose from 43% in May 2010. Pew points out that the demographic has not really changed, there are just more people from those demographics downloading apps. For smartphones, they tend to be young, have higher incomes and college degrees and live in urban and suburban areas. How do you fit in these demographics?