ReadWriteWeb

Mobile cloud platform Appcelerator is having its first-ever developers' conference this week in Mountain View dubbed CODESTRONG. At the conference the company is announcing the "Appcelerator Open Mobile Marketplace" that is essentially a Salesforce AppExchange-like marketplace for independent software vendors and cloud providers. Appcelerator's marketplace is the first ever to bring software and solutions specifically for mobile to a centralized hub and could be an inflection point for how mobile development growth and how tools are bought and shared.

Appcelerator, through its acquisition of Aptana this January, gives it a developer base of almost 1.5 million. The marketplace will be integrated into the company's Titanium platform and provide mobile modules, app templates, design and cloud extensions. Salesforce was a driver behind cloud development with AppExchange. Appcelerator hopes to do the same with mobile.

As promised back in May, multiple APK support has now arrived in the Android Market. Originally said to be launching in June, the actual arrival took a bit longer, it seems. The new publishing option will allow developers to maintain separate copies of their apps for different devices, whether those are tablets, phones, TVs or otherwise. Developers can also use this feature to offer apps optimized for different chipsets or OS platform versions.

At WWDC this morning, Apple announced that its iOS mobile operating system, which powers iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices, is now at #1 in terms of market share. iOS has 44% of the total mobile OS market, compared to Android at 28%.

According to Scott Forstall, SVP of iOS software at Apple, 200 million iOS devices have been sold, 25 million of which were iPads, Apple's tablet computer released just 14 months ago.

A new report from mobile analytics firm Distimo takes an in-depth look into the download volumes in Google's Android Market, and the numbers it finds are somewhat surprising. Android may have a larger number of apps - 200,000 Google reported earlier this month - but it doesn't have a large number of "winners."

Distimo found that just 96 applications have been downloaded more than 5 million times in the Google Android Market, for example. In addition, 20% of free apps and 80% of paid apps have been downloaded less than 100 times to date.

Android fragmentation issues are a continual complaint among the developer community, but Google has not been ignoring the problem, it seems. Not only will the forthcoming Android version "Ice Cream Sandwich" at last merge the two separate operating system versions, Gingerbread and Honeycomb, into one, Google has also just confirmed that it will launch "Multiple APK" support in its Android Market next month.

This new feature, as the name implies, will allow developers to maintain separate versions of their apps intended for different devices.

Remember last week when U.S. trends-tracking firm Nielsen reported that Android had passed both RIM's BlackBerry and Apple's iOS to become the number one mobile platform in the U.S.? Well, prepare for a little déjà vu. This week, a report from comScore is confirming the exact same thing. According to the measurement firm's numbers from January 2011, Android just edged out RIM to move into the number one position for the first time, with a 31.2% market share figure compared with RIM's 30.4%.

A report this morning circulating the Web states that Google's rollout of in-app payments support for Android applications has been delayed until May 2011. If true, this would not be the first delay for the system, which was expected to launch in Q4 2010, but was pushed back to Q1 2011.

However, these initial reports were inaccurate, according to people familiar with the matter. Google's plans for in-app purchases within Android applications are still on track for a Q1 2011 launch.

Yesterday, Google launched its highly anticipated Android Market refresh, an update which now offers consumers the ability to browse and search for mobile applications from their desktop computer and then download those apps to their phone or tablet wirelessly. The experience is a vast improvement over the previous version of the Android Market, which oddly enough, didn't even offer search functionality.

But while the front-facing features of the new Market got a lot of press, there were also two important changes for developers to take note of: added support for buyer's currency and in-app purchases.

The mobile application marketplace will reach $25 billion by 2015, according to a new report from World Mobile Applications Market, a U.S.-based market research firm. It's yet another confirmation of the huge worldwide trend that is the proliferation of app stores.

The mobile app market was $6.8 billion this year, the reports says, but will grow steadily over the next four years to reach $25 billion. And out of that $25 billion, Apple's App Store will account for 20.5% of total revenues.

On Friday, Google announced that its Android Market will soon receive a major update. Over the next two weeks, a brand new Android Market client will be rolled out to all devices running Android version 1.6 or higher. For the most part, the update is a user interface redesign that introduces new categories, improved navigation, app content ratings and more. However, there are a few features that will be important to both developers and users alike, including a change to the refund window and additional device targeting capabilities.

While welcome, these updates may not be all Google has in store, only those it's revealing for now. Android Developer Ecosystem chief Eric Chu teases via blog post, "we're not done yet...stay tuned."