There seems to be a major war going on between Microsoft, Apple, and Google to see who can get the most apps on their smartphone interfaces, and the competition is spreading to the tablet industry as well. The reason for this is that the company that has the most apps also tends to have the most customers. For some reason, apps and business seem to be interrelated.   And there are many open source developing communities jumping in on the fray with programs like VLC and Filezilla.

All three of these companies have developer programs that are open for submissions. App development has been a growing industry, and many people are entering the competition because of the residual income that can come from the sale of apps. Popular apps that you may have heard of are Angry Birds, Fandango, and Sky Burger.

Google has an impressive number of apps for their Android devices, and more apps are being created for the new Honeycomb and Gingerbread operating systems. When Google first entered the battle, many people were skeptical of whether they could succeed, but Android is now at a level to openly compete with Apple.  And as we have seen in the software industry, there is always a fringe community that opens their code for development to challenge the big companies.  There is the Open Office package that can replace Microsoft Office on your tablet and a program like Xvid that allows multiple platforms for watching videos.

Apple was the original company to enter the smartphone industry, and their iPod Touch as well as many other versions of the iPod are still popular. It may have also been the success of their iTunes store that prompted others to enter the market and provide devices and create apps that had a similar function and value to what Apple had already done. Microsoft is a pretty small competitor in mobile devices compared to Apple and Google, but they shouldn’t be counted out just yet. Their app store is growing at an impressive rate, faster than both Google and Apple combined.

There is no question that advancements in technology are going to continue at a fast pace, particularly in the smartphone industry. This segment might even be growing faster than the peer to peer sharing community with programs like Ares grew in the past.  Everyone is pushing towards a multipurpose device that can handle all of the needs a person could ever want.