There are presumably more Android phones and devices out there now than there are iPhones (and iPod Touches). However, it seems Android users keep holding their wallets much closer to their chests than iPhone users and iOS users in general.

Case in point, according to a new report from Distimo, the App Store for iPhone generates almost 4x as much revenue as Google’s Android Market in the US. This also includes revenues from in-app purchases. Even looking at just the App Store for iPad, it outclasses Android Market with 2x the revenue.

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Here’s a thought, or rather a theory, that we’d love to run by you.

It starts with a little piece of irony. Most advertisers want people to buy their product, i.e. pay for it. When an app (on any platform) is free and sponsored by ads, a large portion of its user base will be people who want something for free. If we’re allowed to generalize here, they don’t want to pay if they can avoid it.

Spotted the problem yet?

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Twitter became what it is today largely thanks to a big and very enthusiastic community of third-party developers who built applications on top of the fast-growing service. There were other factors as well, but few would argue that strong support from its developer community hasn’t been key to Twitter’s success.

For developers, the Twitter API has been almost as hot a commodity as the Twitter service itself. So imagine our surprise when we noticed that worldwide interest in the Twitter API seems to have dropped off since mid-2010 (based on search statistics from Google).

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You’ve been asking for it, ladies and gentlemen, and now you have it: a Pingdom app for Android.

Just like our iPhone app, the Pingdom Android app is an excellent companion to the Pingdom uptime monitoring service. It lets you connect to your Pingdom account to view the status of the servers and websites you’re monitoring, and also supports alerts via push notifications.

The app is free, and works together with all types of Pingdom accounts (including free accounts).

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Android has received plenty of criticism for the way the platform has fragmented over time. Most complaints focus on there being so many different versions of Android out there in the hands of consumers, not to mention the different UI enhancements that different phone makers have added.

A fragmented platform is harder for developers to target and makes it difficult to create a consistent user experience, which of course is bad for end users.

But there’s another kind of fragmentation happening on Android as well.

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Yesterday, Apple announced that it will be launching an App Store for Mac OS X, modelled after the App Store for iPhone and iPad. It will be available 90 days from now and we believe it will be a game-changer for several reasons.

Why? Because it maps a very successful concept from the handheld world to the world of the personal computer (yes, the Mac is a PC…), and it translates very well.

Here is why it will be a success.

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The two mobile platforms with the most apps are Google’s Android with around 95,000 apps, and Apple’s iOS with around 250,000 apps.

Those are impressive numbers, but this article isn’t about the sheer number of apps available. Instead, we wanted to focus on a very interesting distinction between the two platforms: The radical difference in the ratio between free and paid apps.

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Google has made great strides with Android, and a ton of developers have flocked to the growing mobile platform. Not everything is rosy, though. One major concern among developers is that piracy levels are very high on the platform.

Google is of course not oblivious to this and recently announced plans to combat piracy with DRM methods that app developers can include in their apps. But there is one problem that is arguably much more problematic for Android developers when it comes to getting paid for their apps, and it isn’t getting nearly as much attention as we think it should.

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It seems like not a week goes by without new numbers of how many apps there are in Apple’s iPhone App Store or Google’s Android Market. And frankly, it’s starting to get ridiculous.

First of all, there is the old adage of “quality, not quantity” to think about (remember that one?), and then there’s another aspect: what counts as an app?

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Think about the software you use day to day. Depending on your profession and interests, what you use will vary, but some applications tend to show up over and over again. Microsoft Word and Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, various web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, Skype, iTunes, and so on.

When it comes to those widely used, highly established desktop applications, think about how long it’s been since they first saw the light of day. Many of them are practically ancient.

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