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In a surprisingly candid move, Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond published an opinionated post on the company's official blog contending that its Android mobile operating system is under "attack" from a "hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents."

Drummond's post is in reference to last week's sale of Nortel's patent portfolio to a consortium of Google's competitors. The purchase of these patents threatens Android's dominant share of the smartphone OS market by making the operating system more expensive for phone manufacturers to license.

Are you an iOS developer thinking about dipping your toe into the Android pool? If so, you should read developer Nick Farina's post about his experience developing on Android after developing on iOS.

Farina compares the development environment (he writes that you'll hate Eclipse at first, but once you get used to it "you'll enjoy some seriously amazing, productivity-boosting code completion, refactoring, and automatic fixing."), provides slick side-by-side code comparisons (spoiler: Java and Objective-C look a lot alike) and addresses the fragmentation issue.

Apple is now the largest supplier of smartphones across the globe, according to reports from research firms IDC and Strategy Analytics on second quarter device sales. Apple sold 20.3 million iPhones in the second quarter to jump Nokia to take the top spot with 18.5% of global market share. Samsung also overtook Nokia with 19.2 million smartphones shipped and 17.2% of the market ahead of Nokia's 15.2%.

In the smartphone platform wars, Android led iOS and BlackBerry with around 36% of U.S. market share in April, according to comScore. Those numbers have held pretty steady in the three months since. Apple was second with 26% and the hemorrhaging of Research In Motion continued, falling 25.7%. In terms of manufacturers, Apple is the fourth largest supplier of cell phones (smart and feature) in the world with 5.6% of the market, behind Nokia (24.2%), Samsung (19.2%) and LG (6.8%). With the expected release of the iPhone 5 coming in the third quarter, Apple is looking to continue its rampage of the mobile market and put further distance between its competitors in the mobile marketplace.

Qualcomm has released its Augmented Reality (AR) SDK for iOS, which now joins the Android version launched back in April. Like the Android SDK, the new iOS toolkit will enable mobile developers to create high-performance, interactive, 3D experiences, which are triggered by pointing the device's camera at real-world objects.

Today Nielsen is reporting that Google's mobile operating system Android now has the largest smartphone operating system (OS) market share here in the U.S. The top three mobile operating systems, according to this new data, are Android (39%), Apple's iOS (28%) and RIM (20%).

However, Apple is the top manufacturer of smartphones. This claim is mainly due to the fact that Apple ships its own phones, while Android is spread out across a number of OEM's, including leading manufacturers like HTC, Motorola and Samsung.

AppCentral this week announced their Developer Lab, a free resource for developers that provides the tools, solutions and support needed to build, deploy and manage mobile enterprise apps running on iOS and Android devices. The lab allows you to test your apps in production for up to 20 users, and have access to a variety of development tools include Appcelerator Titanium. You can create a custom enterprise app store and deploy up to four app updates within any given year, and also participate in their own discussion forums to learn more about app best practices.

Microsoft is making it easier for mobile developers building apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone to integrate data from Windows Live into their applications. With the recently released update to the developer platform known as Messenger Connect, Microsoft introduced APIs for SkyDrive, Hotmail and Messenger, which can be used in both websites and mobile apps.

OS X Lion, Apple's newest version of the Mac operating system, launching today, represents a first effort at blending Apple's mobile platform made popular by the ubiquitous iPhone with that of the desktop. Several features found in Lion seem inspired by the mobile experience, from full-screen apps to multi-touch gestures, both now commonplace on mobile devices.

But can the mobile and desktop platforms ever truly merge? That's a question that neither Apple nor its competitors have yet to answer.

Analytics firm Flurry has analyzed trends on its network of 45,000 companies and 90,000 apps to determine where developers are investing their R&D budgets this year. In a comparison of Q1 2011 and Q2 2011, you can see that the Android project starts have dropped from 36% to 28% while those on iOS have picked up.

The average price for iOS applications is now at $1.44, up 14% year-over-year. And consumers are buying more apps this year than they did last - 61% more, in fact. This data comes from a new report from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster (reported via Fortune), who found that today's iOS device owners will download 83 applications this year, up from 51 in 2010.