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As expected, Amazon has opened its new Appstore for Android today, letting Android users purchase and download apps via the website or through a new native Android app.

As Sarah Perez noted yesterday in her report on the store's launch, the new marketplace for Android apps may be an important step forward for both Android users and developers. The Amazon store will compete directly with the official Google Marketplace, often criticized for poor search and discovery - a drawback for those looking to buy and build Android apps.

This morning, much of the tech world stood still as Steve Jobs delivered his keynote address at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, introducing the next-generation iPhone. As usual with a "Jobsnote," Steve took some time to let the audience know where the company stood with a few back-patting statistics. Jobs said the iPad has added 8,500 native apps since launching two months ago - a growth rate nearly three times that of the iPhone and iPod Touch two months after the launch of the AppStore in 2008.

Mozilla is following in Opera's footsteps by porting an AppStore-friendly version of its browser over to the iPhone with an free app called Firefox Home. Due to Apple's restrictions the app will not offer a full-fledged browser experience, and thus you will not be able to simply navigate to any website. Instead, users will be able to sync their browsing history, bookmarks and open tabs onto their iPhone using Mozilla's encrypted Firefox Sync technology.

Last week during my stint at Boulder Startup Week, Occipital co-founder Vikas Reddy was gracious enough to let me stay with him rather than in a hotel. Oddly enough it wasn't until one of the late night mixers a few days into the event that I got a chance to talk with Reddy about Occipital and the company's history and evolution. As it turns out, barcode scanning, which the company is now well known for with its RedLaser application, was not their original plan, but rather a pivot made to take the company in a more profitable direction.

Dutch mobile augmented reality (AR) developers Layar announced today the launch of the world's first mobile marketplace for AR content, bringing a new model for the monetization of mobile AR to the Android and iPhone platforms. Anyone looking to take advantage of the excitement behind AR experiences can now create AR content, syndicate it on Layar's platform and benefit from its use by charging users a small one-time fee to access it.

Even though Apple launched a major redesign of iTunes yesterday, searching the iTunes App Store is still a bit of a hassle, especially because iTunes lacks convenient options to filter apps by price, category, or release date. Given the amount of apps available in the store, even Apple's new Genius feature for the App Store isn't likely to make finding new apps much easier. UQuery, however, sets out to change all of this by indexing all the apps in the store and making this index available through a web-based search engine.

I tell people about the Rachel Maddow iPhone app all the time; almost no one has heard of it, but it's great. From now on I won't just tell them about it - I'll share a link to it by email with just a few clicks in the new iPhone app from Appsfire, just approved by the App Store last night.

Appsfire is a handy little service that makes it easy to share collections of your favorite apps with other people. There are a variety of ways to use it, but using it on the iPhone is the most pleasing, straightforward and clearly useful. This app indexes all your other apps, makes it easy to share with anyone and shows off the most popular apps shared by all users and users in your geographic region. It's far from perfect, but it's so useful anyway that we recommend you get it.

AdMob just released some data about how iPhone users discover new apps in the App Store and how they use them once they have downloaded them. According to AdMob, most users download apps from the App Store directly from their phones. Only 7% go through iTunes to download apps. To find new apps, 62% of all respondents searched for a specific app and 60% looked through the lists of top selling apps in the store. AdMob also found that the majority of users (62%) install between 1 and 6 new apps per month and 22% of all iPhone users download more than 11 apps per month.

By the end of this year, Apple's App Store will carry more than 100,000 apps. According to Flurry, which specializes in providing real-time analytics to mobile app developers on the iPhone, Android, JavaME, and Blackberry, new project starts among iPhone developers show no sign of slowing down. Flurry, however, also noticed that a growing number of developers have started to work on Android applications - maybe in reaction to Apple's erratic App Store approval process. Over the past six months, the number of new Android apps that have integrated Flurry's analytics doubled and the pipeline for new Android apps is also filling up quickly.

Apple has never been one to be overly communicative with their developer community and the iTunes App Store is no exception. There is often little communication between Apple and developers when it comes to why an app is rejected or why its launch in the store is delayed. Now with the recent removal of all Google Voice related applications from the App Store - and again, with no explanations - at least one developer has had enough.

But lack of communication is only one of the issues with today's App Store approval process. O'Reilly Research is reporting today that the incubation period for apps is now trending upward - a figure that seems to speak to Apple's becoming overwhelmed by the number of submissions. And finally, courtesy of Apple's mysterious approval process, they've accidentally let yet another "adult"-themed application into the App Store once again.