The mobile industry has never been so hot. Forst, Apple announces quietly that users have downloaded 300 million apps among the 10,000 apps available on the iPhone Apps store. Apple is also pushing the iPhone in new sales channels, specifically WalMart, which may be the only retailer on the planet to have increased sales during the downturn.

Their competitor, Google’s Android, is getting more allies in their fight. Sony Ericson will be building Android phones after initially refusing to join Google’s mobile push. Sony is still part of the community that will be working on Nokia’s Symbian platform, which is in the process of being open sourced. But there has been little good news from Nokia lately. We will see if the revamped Symbian can compete with the brand new iPhone and Android platforms.

Last night, I attended my first Google Android Developer Meetup. The month before, I attended my first iPhone Developer Meetup. With this tiny sample, I am more than qualified to start issuing unproven generalities.

The iPhone meetups have been going on for several months and have a large number of developers. The Android meetup is only two months old and had about 2 dozen developers. The iPhone crowd was mainly people looking to make money on the iPhone, either for themselves or for their company. The Android meetup was primarily attended by people programming Android as a hobby and out of curiosity. But the biggest difference of all: just about everyone at the iPhone meetup owned an iPhone or iTouch while only three people at the Android meetup owned a Google phone.

One of the more interesting statements for why the developers had not bought a Google phone yet was that the Android programming test tools included an excellent simulator while the iPhone simulator almost required a developer to buy a real iPhone to test their applications. But the other reason that the Google phones were not purchased yet is that developers have already bought the iPhone, in addition to the phone that they already owned, and just did not see any big reason to buy another phone.

Every other news article on the iPhone Apps Store includes a mention of how Apple is the ogre that controls who can pass over their bridge to the iPhone users. This monopoly is always compared to the other famous tech monopoly, Microsoft and its Windows product. The latest unhappy iPhone App Store developer is none other than Google.

On one hand, it is bizarre that a big company like Google cannot get their press releases and software releases synch up. On a side note, they did have a misfire on their Chrome browser as well. But it was not due to the delay of a competitor but by the efficiency of snail mail in Europe and the lack of a holiday. (Consider the irony: snail mail throwing of a Internet giant and the lack of a holiday in Europe compared to the U.S.)

On the other hand, it is nice to know that all developers, big and small, will be made to dance to Apple’s unknown App Store rules and policies.

The Mobile OS landscape is in flux. But the question is who will be the winners going forward. My guess is that the older operating systems will just not provide the experience that user will grow to prefer. They will still have their niches, but they will be squeezed out of new applications.

The two newest operating systems are the Apple iPhone and the Google Android. Google has had a slow start out of the gate than Apple, but the software will appeal more to developers and possibly users as Google uses its knowledge and money to port the Google applications to the Android platform.

Apple strength is that it keeps tight control over its platform and its applications. That is also its potential weakness. This rigid platform provided users who were unfamiliar with the mobile web and mobile devices in general a pretty and safe place to learn and experiment with their new devices. But more technical users are already chaffing to hack the iPhone.

By its very nature, Google is going to be as hands off as possible. This is not due to good will on its part. Google is interested in making money on ads, not being a type of mobile police officer. It is even ignoring the small amounts of cash that it could make from cut in app download revenues. Google is interested in preserving its cash cow and can be generous on every other aspect of its operating system and app store. What is really interesting is how older companies like Microsoft approach the new mobile market with the same outlook as before. Someone at Microsoft should really sit down with Ballmer and explain the rational in giving away software. They might want to start by showing how much money Google could make with mobile ads if it can corner the market the way that it did on the regular Internet.

If you follow the mobile market, then you know that there are essentially 4 operating systems that are really making wavies. The two oldest are the Blackberry, which is closed source and private, and Symbian, which was recently purchased by Nokia and made open source and free. Both of these systems are rather old school. Their basic code was written before the days of social networking and user generated content. The last two are the newest, the Apple iPhone, which is closed and private, and Google’s Android, which is open source and free. Both of these two systems were freshly created with the newest Internet applications in mind.

There are lots of other programming languages for mobile devices that you just don’t hear much about anymore. Sometimes you hear about the open source effort of Linmo, a kind of open source Linux for smartphones, mentioned in the same sentence as the Google Android, which borrowed heavily from it. But without a big company and an even bigger marketing effort, it is unlikely that it will be able to compete with other free, solid operating systems. The other big loser is Java for mobile phones, also called J2ME. It has dropped in importance so much that Handango, a top distributor of mobile applications, will not even distribute free J2ME applications anymore. Ouch!