Google announced that its Android Market mobile applications storefront now boasts roughly 30,000 apps–just three months earlier, the store offered 16,000 apps. MobileCrunch reported the official Google total after data from analytics provider AndroLib.com calculated the present Android Market app inventory at close to 35,000. Google declined to break down the percentage of premium Android applications and free apps, but according to AndroLib, the split is about 39 percent paid and 61 percent free.

Android application development surged late last year in the wake of news Verizon Wireless would introduce its first Android smartphone, the Motorola Droid, with Android project starts increasing 94 percent between September and October according to mobile in-application analytics provider Flurry.

The global market for mobile applications is forecast to reach US$17.5 billion in the next two years, according to a new study commissioned by GetJar, claimed to be the world’s second largest app store. The study claimed the number of downloads would climb from 7 billion last year to 50 billion by 2012 – a 92 percent year-on-year increase. Apple’s App Store is the leading player, but GetJar said that the number of app stores had risen from just four before 2008 to 48 today. “We wanted to find out the real value of the industry because we felt certain segments like the iPhone were being over-hyped and so-called feature phones were being under-hyped,” GetJar founder and chief executive officer Ilja Laurs told the BBC. He questioned some of the valuations of Apple’s apps business and said that the impact of feature phones (rather than smartphones) in the apps market was being overlooked. “It is almost as if these phones don’t exist,” he said. “We know smartphones are an extremely important phenomenon, but in terms of consumer mindshare and revenue share, feature phones represent 90 percent of the global market compared to 10 percent for smartphones and data cards.”

The study found that ‘off-deck’ paid-for apps will be the biggest revenue generator by 2012, accounting for almost 50 percent of all apps revenue. By comparison, in 2009, ‘on-deck’ apps available from mobile operators accounted for over 60 percent of all apps revenue, but is forecast to fall to just under 23 percent by 2012. On a regional basis, the study forecast that apps revenues in Europe would rise from US$1.5billion in 2009 to US$8.5billion in 2012, while in North America the figure would rise from around US$2.1billion to around US$6.7billion over the same period.

Motorola is hard at work on the Droid for what it hopes would be the device to take on Apple’s iPhone. If specs are something to go on, it certainly impresses with a 800 Mhz ARM Cortex processor running on Android 2.0, a 5MP camera with a built in neon flash, a great capacitive display measuring 3.7 inches and the world’s thinnest QWERTY keypad.

Measuring 60.00 x 115.80 x 13.70 mm, it’s just slightly thicker than the iPhone 3GS but at least you could change the batteries on the Driod. Supported media formats include: MPEG-4, H263, H264, WMV; AMR-NB/WB, MP3, PCM / WAV, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA (something iPhone refuses to support).

The crypic Da-Vinci like countdown timer on the Driod homepage got the Internet working on the release date – Pharanoid.com broke the code to reveal October 28th as the release date.