But the figure is still impressive and shows just how fast the app market is growing. Last year, over the same period, Dec. 25 – 31, Flurry estimated there were 1.2 billion apps downloaded. By December 2012, the average one-week download tally had already risen to 1.07 billion. So app downloads over the holiday week grew by 65 percent over the weekly December baseline, which itself was close to eclipsing last week’s record for most downloads in a week.

Flurry also estimated there were 50 million iOS and Android devices activated over the last week of 2012. As we wrote earlier, the big growth in Christmas device activations was in tablets, which for the first time eclipsed daily smartphone activations. I suspect that the holiday week download numbers also reflected a rise in tablet app downloads as well, which is good news for developers who are targeting those devices.

Flurry, which pulls its data from 260,000 iOS and Android apps that run its analytics and advertising software, said the U.S. led the way with 604 million downloads, or 34.3 percent, followed by China, the U.K. and Germany. For 2013, Flurry expects the 1 billion weekly download mark to be the norm. And at this pace, we should also easily get to 2 billion weekly downloads at some point soon.

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Mojito is just one of the tools that the company has built internally as part of its Yahoo Cocktails program. But now it’s making Mojito available to all to play around with and improve upon.

The idea behind Mojito is that developers will be able to build JavaScript-based applications that can be run on a number of devices, and adapt to the unique problems of the mobile web — that is, low-powered devices with constrained and spiky network traffic. Rather than have to choose between building for the web, mobile web or native app frameworks, developers will be able to create hybrid apps that perform well in any of those situations.

It does that by giving developers the ability to blur the lines between building for client-based processing or server-based processing. Mojito apps can run on the client, using the device’s JavaScript engine, or it can run on the server via Node.js. That makes app development a little more flexible and modular than it previously had been.

To see the results, you can check out a number of Yahoo apps that leverage Mojito. Those include Yahoo! Livestand, a native app; Fantasy Finance, a Web site; and Fantasy Premier League Football, which is a mobile Web app. Or you can build your own, as Yahoo’s Mojito is now available on GitHub.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Xavi Talleda.

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We have seen some of the top download lists for mobile apps, but which apps were the best rated and most buzzed about in 2011? That’s a question that app-rating analytics firm Mobilewalla tackled, coming up with a list of the top five paid and free apps on four of the biggest mobile platforms.

Some of the results reflect overall popularity measured in downloads, but in other cases, there are apps that did quite well that may not be as familiar as Angry Birds. More interesting, I think, is the way the lists draw out distinctions between the different platforms and what that might mean, especially in the hunt for a third competitor after iOS and Android.

To be sure, this is a very small slice of the top apps, and larger trends would emerge if we looked at a bigger list of apps. Mobilewalla said it looked at store rankings, ratings, reviews, buzz on social networks and mentions on influential app blogs. Take a look at the lists based on the top Mobilewalla scores, and we will follow up with more commentary.

Android: top paid with score and release date

1. MADDEN NFL 12 (0.936) 09-01
2. Dragon, Fly! Full (0.929) 09-28
3. Earth And Legend (0.923) 09-28
4. Great Little War Game (0.9218) 10-04
5. SHADOWGUN (0.918) 10-28

Android: top free

1. Pixlr-o-matic (0.975) 09-28
2. Super Stickman Golf (0.975) 09-28
3. Smurfs’ Village (0.970) 09-30
4. Crime Story (0.964) 09-28
5. Marvel Comics (0.963) 10-14

IOS: top paid

1. Angry Birds Rio (0.939) 03-22
2. Tiny Wings (0.928) 02-19
3. Craigslist + Notifications. CraigsPro+ Craigslist + Photo Wall + Photo previews (0.917) 02-10
4. Where’s My Water? (0.910) 09-22
5. Lock My Photos — Password lock photos & picture data for peace of mind! (0.897) 05-21

IOS: top free 

1. MLB.com At Bat Lite (0.960) 02-25
2. My Horse (0.952) 09-20
3. Family Feud & Friends (0.935) 10-19
4. Funny Videos & Pics by Break.com (0.927) 02-18
5. MetalStorm: Wingman (0.923) 05-12

BlackBerry: top paid 

1. Sea Storm Animated Theme 2.0 (0.947) 07-06
2. Love Is Love — Great Offer of Valentine’s Day (0.919) 07-06
3. Playboy’s Animated Luck O’ The Irish (0.904) 07-06
4. Underwater HD Animated Theme (0.901) 07-06
5. Juicy Girl Theme — On Sale! (0.895) 07-06

BlackBerry: top free 

1. Memory Booster Pro (0.951) 04-26
2. BlackBerry Protect (0.951) 03-08
3. Memory Booster (0.949) 02-13
4. AppsLock — Password Protect Applications (Full Version) (0.947) 07-31
5. Slider Lock Free — slide to unlock your phone (0.945) 10-27

Windows Phone 7: top paid

1. Phone 8 (0.923)05-17
2. Weather Live (0.917) 07-07
3. Fuse (0.890) 2011-08-29
4. IFun (0.890) 03-23
5. SuperTube (0.884) 03-20

Windows Phone 7: top free

1. TuneIn Radio (0.967) 02-23
2. Penguin (0.960) 06-24
3. Dictionary.com — Dictionary and Thesaurus (0.957) 06-27
4. GMaps (0.957) 04-22
5. PhotoFunia (0.957) 06-27

There are a couple of interesting things to point out on this list. Despite what Xyologic recently reported on Android users’ favoring nongaming apps, seven of the top Android apps between paid and free were games. That suggests that when Android users find games they like, they take note. IOS is evenly split between games and nongames in the top five. That shows that Android users do like their games, even if their platform doesn’t have the same reputation for gaming that iOS has.

But Anindya Datta, the founder and executive chairman of Mobilewalla, said the Android findings might reflect the fact that Google’s operating system is pushing into a lot of developing countries, where games are more accessible than more-sophisticated apps. But he said Android users are still focusing on a narrower band of apps at the top, something we wrote about earlier, while iOS users tend to discover a wider range of apps. He said the year-end data confirms this, which is still a challenge for Android developers.

Another interesting finding was that the BlackBerry paid app list was dominated by wallpaper apps while the free app list had more utilities. Datta said that one of the challenges for RIM is that BlackBerry users don’t turn to their phones for fun and passing time. That might not surprise anyone, considering BlackBerry’s enterprise roots, but it could be an issue if RIM wants to challenge iOS and Android as a third platform, ahead of Windows Phone 7. Increasingly, the battle includes apps, and it is important to have a good, large and diverse library of apps. If BlackBerry wants to compete broadly, it needs to show it can be a place where people can enjoy all manner of apps, especially the popular ones like games and entertainment that bring fun to people’s lives.

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Timelines for mobile (click to enlarge)

Facebook’s highly anticipated new Timeline user interface is now available pretty much everywhere — including on mobile devices.

Earlier this morning Facebook announced worldwide availability of the new Timeline profile interface for all of its users. And now the company has now also launched Timeline on its mobile Android app and on its mobile website, m.facebook.com.

Facebook has not provided details about when Timelines should be added to its native apps for the iPhone or iPad; and a spokesperson said only that “Timeline on iPhone will be available in an upcoming update of the Facebook for iOS app.”

Facebook first unveiled Timeline at its f8 conference in September, but for the past three months the new interface was generally only available to people who signed up for the developer beta test. Last week Facebook initiated its larger-scale roll-out of Timeline in New Zealand, and now the new look is available for any user who visits  the Introducing Timeline page on Facebook and clicks “get it now.”

Not a fan of the new look? You better start getting used to it. A Facebook spokesperson told GigaOM at the f8 conference that opt-in will be available “for a few weeks” before everyone is moved over to the new design. The roll-out since then has taken longer than expected, so the opt-in period may be longer than that, but eventually all Facebook profiles will be in the Timeline interface.

Here are a few images of Timeline on mobile (click to enlarge):

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But Mono’s Founder and Lead Developer Miguel de Icaza was not about to let that be the end of the road. Fewer than two weeks after Novell swung the axe, de Icaza announced the launch of Xamarin, a startup calling itself “the new home of the engineers that created Mono” with a strong focus on mobile products. It was inspiring news, but it was clear Xamarin had its work cut out for it: Moving an open-source project like Mono away from the cushy corporate parent company in which it lived for nearly eight years would not be a walk in the park.

The challenge was big, but today, Xamarin is going strong: The company is generating self-sustaining revenue and is on a steady product launch schedule. (Last week it rolled out Mono for Android 4.0, which lets developers make apps that work with the latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.) We caught up with Miguel de Icaza, who serves as Xamarin’s CTO, a few days ago to get a few more details on how things have been going since he and his team decided to go it alone.

Xamarin founder Miguel de Icaza

A wild summer leads to a profitable fall

“It was a wild summer,” de Icaza said. Back when Xamarin was born in mid-May, the team had to kick into overdrive to make sure it could get off the ground as an independent company. “After the Novell layoffs, one option would be for everyone to go home and just find a different job. But we love this project, and we love what we’re doing,” he said.

That early hustle soon brought results. Xamarin landed a couple of large clients, which allowed the company to hire all the people who had been laid off from the Mono team at Novell. Then in July, Xamarin inked a partnership with SUSE (the Attachmate business unit that now houses all the old Novell assets) to obtain all the rights to Mono. In exchange, Xamarin agreed to provide support for all of the old Mono customers. “We got ten years’ worth of intellectual property, and Novell got all its customers taken care of,” de Icaza said.

Funding is no longer a must-have

As a result of garnering the rights to Mono and a solid customer base, Xamarin wound up with self-sustaining revenue that covers its staff of some 50 people — without having taken on any venture capital. According to de Icaza, Xamarin may still take on outside investors, but it’s not a must:

“During week one of the layoff [taking funding] was the only option on the table. Now we have a product that brings self-sustaining revenue. Taking on outside money is still a discussion we can have, and it’s something we’ll consider, but it’s not a pressing issue.”

The new year and beyond

Xamarin has no plans to start resting on its laurels; according to de Icaza, the company has plans to be busy for many months ahead. “We want to make it easier for people to share code between Windows, iPhone and Android, and we believe we can make this the one language that can do that. We want to make people incredibly productive with our stack for mobile development,” he said. “All these people trusted that we could deliver these tools, now we need to keep making the product better.”

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“Six months ago we stopped. We just said, ‘Okay, what are people really using Path to do?’” Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin said in an interview this week. The company surveyed Path users and found that many were using the app to remember moments in their daily lives — it wasn’t just about sharing photos, it was about cataloging personal memories for themselves. “Ultimately we realized that we had to completely re-imagine Path.”

Path 2, the new version of Path that is launching Tuesday for both iPhone and Android, is what’s emerged from that redesign effort. But to think of this as the 2.0 version of Path would be a big mistake: Path 2 is a dramatically different product than the app the company launched one year ago.

A diary for a mobile and social world

Path 2 aims to be a “smart journal” that catalogs all the big and small moments of your daily life. Along with your photos and videos, the new app has features that let you keep track of your thoughts, the music you’re listening to, where you are, who you’re with, and even when you wake and when you sleep. You can choose to keep each update entirely to yourself, share it with your Path contacts (limited to 150 based on Dunbar’s number), or share it publicly via Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare (Tumblr support is on the way.)

Path 2 screenshot (click to enlarge)

Morin took me through an in-depth demo of Path 2, and for me it had the perfect combination that I look for in the increasingly crowded world of mobile apps: It was both beautiful and actually useful. Lots of people — myself included — maintain personal blogs or use social media sites partly for the same reason that they would maintain a diary: To personally remember what they’ve done. Every New Years’, I vow that I will be better about tracking the little things that make up my days by keeping a journal, but I typically start slacking off on it a couple months in. With Path 2, it could be a lot easier to keep my resolution: It’s on my mobile phone which makes it easy, and the social options make it more fun.

More complexity, more competition

With this redesign, Path is going more squarely into competition with services such as Evernote and even Facebook, the platform on which it was conceived as a much simpler photo-sharing app one year ago. When asked about this, Morin stressed that Path is different from Facebook on several counts: “We’re private by default and always will be, while Facebook is often public by defualt. We’re a tech company, Facebook is a media company. We’re a freemium business, and Facebook is advertising driven.” He was more accepting of an Evernote comparison, but pointed out that many people use Evernote primarily to keep track of their business lives. “What Evernote does for work, we do for life.”

Path 2 music post (click to enlarge)

This move also brings up questions for Path that weren’t there when it was a simple photo sharing app. When you position your service to be something as personal as a diary, users have the right to be a bit more demanding than they would with a more standard social app. For example: Path 2 still does not have a one-button export feature for all your content, although Morin says this is on the way. Right now, the only way to get all your data from the system is by sending an email request to customer service.

Also, the ability to view and analyze your Path data from other perspectives — say by zooming out to see an annual timeline, or a month view — is not yet available. These types of features could be made possible if Path releases an API, which Morin says is a definite possibility for the future.

But will it have staying power?

The question of money is an important one here. Many web startups don’t start thinking seriously about revenue in the first couple years of business, but if you’re going to use an app as your personal journal, you want to have confidence that it will stay around for a while. Evernote, for example, is a profitable business: The company charges $45 per year for its premium app and the company’s CEO Phil Libin has been forthright about his mission to make Evernote a going concern for the next 100 years.

Path, which has 20 employees, is not at a point where it can cover its own costs. Path 2 is a totally free app and Morin says he has no plans to start running ads. The business model is a “freemium” one, but for now the only premium products Path sells are small: Additional photo filter options and the like. Path has other premium offerings in the pipeline, Morin tells me, and the good news is the company won’t have to worry about keeping the lights on for a while: It has taken on some $11 million in funding since its inception.

All in all, Path 2 is a great looking app and it stands a chance to become a big hit in the months ahead. But if it wants people to really be serious about committing to the new app, Path could do well to outline its financial plans a bit more firmly for prospective users.

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Exhibit A: Venture capital firm DCM announced Thursday the first class of seven startups in its Android-focused fund, or “A-Fund.” The A-Fund is aimed at funding companies who focus on developing technologies and products for the Android ecosystem. The A-Fund is “stage-agnostic,” DCM says, meaning that it will back startups at all stages of growth from inception to full-fledged company.

A wide-open market

And DCM is not the only venture fund turning its attention to Android in a serious way. Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon said in an on-stage conversation at Facebook’s f8 developer conference last month that even though developing apps for Apple’s iOS devices can be a cleaner experience, there’s a big market opportunity for serious Android developers:

“The world needs crazy people who are willing to try to define a curated Android experience, because it doesn’t seem that Google is going to do it. And there’s an awful lot of users out there.”

Larger companies have started to get savvy to the need for Android apps — notably, Yahoo’s Flickr division recently launched its new Instagram-like shoot-and-share mobile app on Android, not on iPhone. My colleague Ryan Kim highlighted how some innovative apps are starting on Android first now instead of iOS. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s looking like Android users may finally start to get the kind of top-rate apps iPhone users have enjoyed for years.

Here’s a list of the A-Fund’s new portfolio companies, and short descriptions of what they do:

• Appia. Creators of a white-label mobile app store platform currently processing over one million downloads per day for operators, handset manufacturers, and other partners.

• Billing Revolution. A mobile payments company that enables easy, fast, and secure payment transactions through their PCI-compliant Single-Click Checkout platform.

• PapayaMobile. The leading Android mobile social gaming network in China and the U.S. with over 30 million users.

• Happy Elements. A social game developer with the largest footprint on Facebook’s non-English market with 2.5 million active daily users, the second and third most popular games on Mixi in Japan, as well as the most popular game on Kaixin001 in China.

• Kanbox. China’s leading cloud storage and sharing service provider.

• Loki Studios. A company revolutionizing mobile gaming with location and environment-aware smartphone games, starting with their flagship monster battle game, Geomon.

• Kakao Corp. Developer of KakaoTalk, an intuitive, cross-platform mobile messaging application with over 25 million users worldwide.

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Since Trover is only as good as the content its users contribute, expanding to Android is key. The Seattle-based company launched as an iPhone-only application in May 2011, and even though it has a web-accessible offering at Trover.com, it’s hard to beat the speedy experience of a native mobile app. Since lots of people have Android phones, the amount of activity and content on Trover now stands to get a significant boost.

Screenshot of Trover for Android (click to enlarge)

Trover is not the only app to join the Android party lately: Recent weeks have seen the debuts of Flickr for Android, Hipmunk for Android and word that Instagram’s Android offering is on the near-term horizon.

Trover for Android works just like the iPhone app: It allows users to take photos of things they’ve seen and places they’ve been and share them with friends and neighbors. Entries are automatically geo-tagged to the location in which the photo was taken and overlaid onto a map. Essentially, Trover CEO Jason Karas says, the app aims to catalog the little “discoveries” and hidden gems people find when exploring a certain place — whether it’s a foreign city or their own hometown.

Even though talk about social media fatigue has picked up recently, Karas tells me that Trover is more popular than ever: Its user base has nearly doubled since I last covered the app, in late July. The company now has more than 100,000 users in over 160 countries. The company is still small — around six full-time employees — and has yet to start making money (its apps are free). Karas says he is currently focused on growing Trover’s user base and will work on generating revenue later on.

Trover is backed with a portion of the $9.8 million invested in TravelPost, the Seattle-based company from which Trover spun out. Trover’s investors include General Catalyst Partners, Ignition Partners and Benchmark Capital.

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The fact is, most of us still use our personal computers and hard drives as the home base for the bulk of our data, from highly sensitive documents to the latest batch of  party photos. And if you forget to upload one of those things to the cloud or email it to yourself before you head out, you’re out of luck if you want to access it on the go.

That’s where a startup called Polkast comes in. Polkast’s has free apps for Android and Apple iOS, let you access all the files on your home or work computer from your iPhone, iPad or Android device. Essentially, Polkast is like a free, pared-down version of Citrix’s GoToMyPC, made for today’s app-dominated world. The Polkast app launched six weeks ago, and it’s gotten solid traction in both the Apple and Android app marketplaces.

Polkcast for iPad accessing photos (click to enlarge)

Cloud benefits, minus the cloud

It works like this: Polkast creates a connection that resembles a virtual private network (VPN) — the company prefers to call it a “direct cloud” — that lets your mobile devices access your computers directly. When you want to access files, the service automatically detects your mobile device’s proximity to the PC and chooses the fastest route: Wi-Fi or over the Internet. Polkast then opens a secure password-protected SSL connection between the two devices, and encrypts all transmissions.

As long as your computer is turned on and connected to the web, and your mobile device is connected to the Internet, Polkast works. (The app is fastest when both PC and mobile device are on the same WiFi connection — but I’ve used Polkast from miles away with speedy results as well.) The company has filed five patents on its technology.

A realistic look at personal data storage

Polkast CEO Hong Bui is quick to point out that his company is not anti-cloud — it’s just realistic. “There are all these wonderful cloud solutions out there. But they usually limit you to between two to five gigabytes of storage before they get very expensive,” he told me in an interview this week. “They seem to forget that we have 500 gigabytes on our home and work computers. You can’t ignore the other content we accumulate there.”

I think Polkast has the potential for very wide appeal for one big reason — it lets you access all your photos, no matter where you are. There are a lot of great photo storage and sharing sites, but if you took 400 photos at a wedding last weekend, chances are you’re not going to upload every single one to Flickr or Facebook directly. You’re going to load them onto your hard drive, and put a small selection online. But Polkast can be used to access your entire photo library at any time — whether you’re playing with your iPad on the couch at home, or wanting to show friends a particular photo when you see them in person.

The bottom line dilemma

Polkast, which is self-funded right now, has one big hurdle ahead: It has yet to make money. Polkast, based in Capo Beach, California, has eight full-time employees. Its apps and services are currently totally free; the company intends monetize eventually by rolling out a premium paid version with extra features targeted at corporate users.

That means a big part of Polkast’s long-term viability depends on its ability to get those customers to pay up. Since Polkast appeals so much to privacy-minded users (at no point is the service in control of your data) it would be hard for the company to make revenue by, say, running ads alongside the service. But if it can get corporate users to pay for the service, the app could have a big future ahead.

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Hipmunk's mascot with an Android spin

Hipmunk has finally brought its travel search application to the Android operating system, with a brand new mobile app that will hit the Android marketplace Thursday.

Hipmunk for Android, which for now only facilitates flight searches, is impressive because it retains all the slickness of the company’s existing web and mobile offerings. That’s no small feat for an app made for Android, an operating system that generally takes a backseat to Apple’s iOS when it comes to user interface design.

I played around with the new app at Hipmunk’s San Francisco headquarters this week, and it’s a pleasure to use. For lack of a better comparison,  the experience is just as smooth as using an iPhone or iPad. That’s not an accident, said Hipmunk’s Android developer Ryan Oldenburg, who worked full-time on the app since joining the company in mid-June.

“The biggest thing about our Android app is it doesn’t not do anything the iOS app does,” Oldenburg told me in an interview. “We really went the extra mile on everything.” In fact, a couple of features — such as the ability to easily clear your flight search history — are currently only found on the Android app, and are likely to be added to the next version of Hipmunk for iOS.

Hipmunk’s Android debut could mark a significant inflection point for the year-old company, which has attracted a loyal following among the early adopter set. iPhones and iPad owners are certainly the choice of many influential folks in tech and media, but Android devices currently account for about half of all smartphones sold in the US. Now that Hipmunk can better serve that huge chunk of the mobile world, the travel app beloved by the cool kids could finally start to get the mainstream following it deserves.

Here are some screenshots of Hipmunk for Android (click to enlarge):

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