“We are very happy that AT&T is now supporting VOIP applications,” said Apple (AAPL) spokeswoman Natalie Kerris. “We will be amending our developer agreements to get VOIP apps on the App Store and in customers’ hands as soon as possible.”

But the new policy hasn’t gone over well with AT&T investors. Shares in the company slipped on the news yesterday and they’re falling still further today. AT&T (T) is trading at $26.21 as I write, down more than two percent from its open. Why? Perhaps due to concerns that the carrier might take a revenue hit when iPhone owners who are using telephony services to make cheap calls switch to low-minute voice plans.

As JP Morgan analyst Mike McCormack notes, voice accounts for $50-$60 of the $95 in monthly revenue generated by the typical iPhone user. If the average user were to drop AT&T’s unlimited voice plan ($99.99/month) in favor of its cheapest ($39.99/month), the carrier could lose upward of 20 percent of voice revenue.

That’s an ugly drop. And while AT&T might offset it by raising its data plan rates, doing so would inevitably outrage customers who are already giving it hell for poor coverage and lousy call quality.

Astonishing, really, when you think about it. In just 12 months, the App Store spawned a thriving developer ecosystem, a new gaming platform and a half-billion dollar software marketplace, an unprecedented achievement in the mobile world. Certainly, Apple’s rivals have all taken note of the company’s success and adopted similar approaches to distributing mobile applications, though–as Jobs notes–it’s going to be tough for them to ever match Apple (AAPL).

Oh, one last point worth making here. You know Steve Jobs is back, really back, when he’s talking smack about rivals in an Apple press release…

Below, a breakdown of apps by category and a graph of their growth over time, courtesy of 148Apps.biz. Click on the charts to enlarge.

What does Apple (AAPL) have in store for its army of third-party Mac OS X and iPhone developers at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco today?

An updated iPhone, or just Mac OS X Snow Leopard and iPhone 3.0?

Will the event’s keynote address feature a cameo appearance from iCEO Steve Jobs, who is preparing to return to Apple’s helm after a six-month medical leave? Or will iNotCEO Phil Schiller continue run the show as he did at MacWorld earlier this year?

• The hall in Moscone West is filling quickly to the sounds of Radiohead. As with most Apple events, the media presence appears huge today. In fact, developers and media seem to be here in almost equal numbers. Lots of excitement. The “welcome to WWDC 2009, please silence your cell phones” announcement is actually met with applause. … Some brassy attendee just wandered in brandishing a new Palm Pre.
• 10:01 and lights dim revealing a movie screen. Onscreen: John Hodgman as PC welcoming attendees to WWDC and encouraging developers to slow down iPhone App development. Increasingly frustrated Hodgeman finally fires off a raspberry. Replaced by Mac guy who welcomes everyone to WWDC. Phil Schiller takes the stage now. “Can’t you feel the love in this room?” 25 million active OS X users in the past two years, he says, talking up Leopard. Installed base has tripled in the past two years.
• These are the best MacBooks we’ve ever made, says Schiller, noting the machine’s new unibody design. Schiller announces a new version of the 15-inch MacBook Pro. Like its 17-inch counterpart, the 15-inch features Apple’s new lithium-polymer battery. “Nicest display we’ve ever put in a notebook,” says Schiller. The machine also features a built-in SD slot geared towards photographers. It’s also the fastest notebook Apple has ever made. 3.06 GHZ. Nice. So happy I bought my new machine two months ago. Onward. Up to 500 GB hard drive. Starts at $1699. Apple is updating the new 17-inch and 13-inch MacBook Pro as well. Similar configurations. Both devices feature that same SD slot. Built-in backlit keyboard. 13-inch is tricked out with a new Firewire 800 port. 13-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1199. All three machines ship today. “This is the most affordable line-up we’ve ever had,” says Schiller.
• Apple is also updating the MacBook air. Two new configurations starting at 1.8 GHZ. “Great hardware deserves great software,” says Schiller. And with that, he welcomes Bertrand Serlet to the stage to talk about OS X. Serlet immediately begins talking smack about Vista and Windows 7. “No end user should ever have to know about disc de-fragmentation,” he quips. Windows 7 is “fundamentally another version of Vista. “It’s the same old technology. … this is so very different from OS X …” Snow Leopard will feature a number of refinements. 90% of the OS has been tweaked, says Serlet. The Finder has been tweaked — not the UI, just the code beneath it. Expose has been built into the Dock. Installation is now 45 percent faster and, once you install it, you actually recover 6GB of disk space. Snow Leopard’s preview performance has also been enhanced.
• Slick. The trackpad now feature Chinese character support. Users simply draw the characters with their fingers.
• Moving on now to Safari 4 which is shipping today for Leopard, Tiger, AND Windows … Safari 4 offers unsurpassed speed for HTML and Javascript. It’s also Acid3 compliant. Safari 4 is 100 percent compliant as opposed to IE, which is 21 percent compliant. Safari 4 is also more crash-resistant and 40 percent faster than its predecessors.
• Also featured in Snow Leopard, live previews of documents and movies — you can actually page through a document or view a movie directly from the dock. Dock Expose seems a very nice feature, allowing app-specific controls, zooming, and workflow across applications. Safari now offers full history search and full Spotlight text search of that history. Safari also monitors Top Sites and notifies a user when they’ve been updated.
• And now on to Quicktime. It features a new UI with disappearing controls. Quicktime also features in-video timelines and the ability to perform basic edits and shares to YouTube, iTunes, etc.
• Serlet talks about all the improvements in technology we’ve seen in computers of the past few years and how new software is necessary to properly take advantage of them. In order to do this, Snow Leopard will run all major applications in 64-bit mode. That will make it substantially faster. Also speeding things up will be Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), a new system-wide technology that manages threads across multi-cores (if I’m understanding this correctly). GCD will increase performance and responsiveness.
• “We’ve decided to build Microsoft Exchange support into Snow Leopard,” says Serlet, to much applause. A quick demo of this new feature shows that set-up is extraordinarily easy. Corporate Exchange accounts are auto-discovered and searchable via Leopard technologies — regardless of whether a user has Microsoft Office installed on their local machine. iCal and Address Book offers integrated views of Exchange events and contacts and local events and contacts. The integration seems very slick and easy. It also supports Exchange’s location and availability features. Serlet points out that Microsoft charges for Exchange support, but Snow Leopard will provide it for free.
• Price? Leopard arrived at market at $129. Snow Leopard will be just $29 for Leopard users. Massive applause. Developer preview available today. The OS will ship in September.
• Scott Forstall takes the stage to talk about the iPhone. Developers have downloaded the SDK over a million times. “There are now over 50,000 apps in the App Store. “We have already sold more than 40 million iPhones and iPod Touches. On April 23rd we crossed the 1 billion apps sold line. That’s 1 billion apps in 9 months.”
• A video featuring a variety of developers gushing about the App Store and the iPhone SDK. Game developers. Medical app developers. “What Apple’s done is made it so we can focus on what we do best and they take care of the rest.” “It’s hard to express how cool the new streaming technology is.” “This is going to be the dominant device, the dominant platform in healthcare.” Video concludes with a variety of end users announcing their favorite app to the camera.
• So what’s next? iPhone OS 3.0, obviously. Its new features: cut, copy and paste, which works across apps and undo support via shake. Also, Landscape view and keyboard for all main applications — mail, messages, etc. MMS support has been added as well. But it’s carrier dependent. In the states, for example, AT&T won’t be supporting it until late summer (audience groans).
• Moving on now to Spotlight search and iTunes. Spotlight search across the entire device and all apps. iTunes store on iPhone will soon over videos for purchase. Audiobooks, too. Support for iTunes U has also been added.
• Tethering: Works on Mac or PC, Over USB or Bluetooth. Seemless. No need for additional software. This is also carrier dependent and … well, look at that. I don’t see an AT&T logo on the list of carriers supporting iPhone tethering. More groans from the audience as Forstall glosses right over this.
• Safari for iPhone now boasts improved performance, HTTP audio and video streaming, auto-fill and HTML 5 support. Also support for 30+ languages.
• Oh, this looks promising: “Find My iPhone.” Cut to video clip from 30 Rock episode in which Liz loses her iPhone. “Find My iPhone” is a feature of MobileMe, apparently. Lose your phone and log in to Mobile Me and the service will locate your phone for you. It will also allow you to force the device to play an audio alert so someone can locate it. And if you can’t? Remote wipe. Nice.
• Moving on now to in-app purchases, peer-to-peer support, accessories, and push notifications — things we heard about at Apple’s previous iPhone 3.0 event. Forstall offering the same details and sales pitch. In fact, this portion of the presentation looks like it’s been repurposed from that event.
• Forstall invites Gameloft to the stage to demo its new app for iPhone 3.0. Asphalt 5, a 3-D racing game. With media player access, users can access their iPod music via a “car stereo.” Developer describes Asphalt 5 as a console gaming experience. Doesn’t seem to quite live up to that description, but it’s still impressive.
• Onstage now, Airstrip Technologies, a medical app developer. “Airstrip Critical Care. Wow. Realtime medical data delivered remotely to iPhone. Measurable, viewable with zoom, searchable.
• Next up: TomTom for iPhone. Looks great, but likely difficult to drive and use at the same time. Enter: TomTom Car Kit. Uses iPhone 3.0’s accessory framework to offer a hands-free experience. Also keeps your phone charged.
• Moving on to ngmoco:), which I believe also demoed at Apple’s iPhone 3.0 event. The company is showing off its newest game — Star Defense. It makes use of 3.0’s new in-app purchase feature. You can buy expansion packs from within the game itself. Game is launching today, but its 3.0 features won’t work until 3.0 goes live.
• ngmoco:) is followed by Pasco, an education app. Using the app and an accessory to collect data on balloon pressure. Forestall joins demoer on stage in full “Mr. Science” get-up. “When you connect sensors to the iPhone, the whole world becomes a laboratory.”
• Next up: Zipcar and its new iPhone app. It tracks and locates Zipcar locations in a particular locale and notifies users of availability. App not only allows users to reserve cars, but helps them locate them as well. Tap a horn icon on your iPhone and the car’s horn sounds off. Tap an unlock icon and the car unlocks.
• A final demo from Line6 and Planet Waves features an guitar amplifier modeling app. Connectivity problems trouble the demo, but the software is impressive. Allows users to control effect, tuning and volume.
• Forstall returns to the stage for some final words about iPhone 3.0. Free for iPhone owners. $9.95 for iPod Touch owners. Available worldwide June 17. GM seed available to developers today. And with that he hands the keynote back over to Schiller. Schiller talks up the iPhone 3G, noting that two thirds of all mobile browsing is now done from iPhones and iPod Touches. He pulls up a graph of various app stores and the number of apps available at each. Apple’s App Store far exceeds them all.
• Schiller announces iPhone 3Gs. S is for speed. “This is a really fast iPhone.” Loads apps and Web sites very, very quickly. NYTimes.com loads more than 3x as fast. Schiller says its about 2x faster than the iPhone 3G. As expected, the device features a brand new 3 megapixel autofocus camera. Auto-focus. Auto-white balance. Auto-exposure. Tap-to-focus. Improved low-light sensitivity. Auto-macro. “The best thing about this camera is it also captures video.” 30 FPS VGA with audio. Auto-focus, etc. Quick demo of video shows that quality is impressive. Videos are stored alongside pix in the picture application. Edit and share videos with the tap of a finger. “And if my carrier supports it, I can even send these things via MMS,” Schiller quips in a poke at AT&T.
• Also new in the 3Gs: Voice Control. Features a brand new UI that displays the commands you can use. Some examples: “Call John.” “Call 414.555.5555.” “Play Songs by The Who.” “Play more songs like this” (using Genius feature). Also on-board in the new device, a built-in digital compass that’s capable of orienting to the direction a user is heading.
• Schiller rattling off new features. Improved security. Improved accessibility features. Improved battery life. 5 hours 3G talk time. 30 hours audio. “This is the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet,” says Schiller. Price? $199 for 16GB. $299 for 32GB. Both available in black and white. Apple will keep the current 8GB 3G on the market at $99. Lot’s of applause. That $99 3G is available TODAY. When will the 3Gs arrive at market? June 19 for initial launch and then a fast and massive roll-out to 80 countries.
• Lights dim to view a new iPhone ad. Big selling point is clearly video. Schiller returns to the stage for the warp-up. Will there be a “one more thing?” Doesn’t look like it. Now thanking all the Apple teams involved in these new products. And … that’s all she wrote.

Check out our WWDC 2009 Full-Coverage special feature for more WWDC news.

Sure, we’ll improve Windows Mobile to better compete with Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone–eventually. Sounds quite a bit like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s “we’re doing our best” remarks about Windows Mobile back in March.

As I noted at the time, “it’s all well and good that Microsoft is accelerating Windows Mobile development to better meet its competition. But that competition isn’t exactly standing still waiting for Microsoft to bring itself to parity. It lapped Microsoft two years ago, and if the software behemoth continues at its present pace, the competition will lap it again. Perhaps it already has.”

In 2007, Google (GOOG) applied for its own mark on Android, the name for its open-source mobile phone operating system, and was rejected on the grounds that it was too similar to Specht’s. Google went ahead and debuted the OS with the Android name anyway, and now Specht is suing the company. In a complaint filed in a Chicago federal court, Specht claims that Google’s use of the term will deceive and confuse customers. He asks the court to bar Google from using the name and demands $2 million in damages for its misstep. Google, says Specht, “stole first and asked questions later.”

Google, for its part, disagrees. The company clearly views the suit as opportunistic and says it has no intention of paying that $2 million penalty. It says the trademark, Android Data, hasn’t been used in at least three years and that Android Data Corporation has been dissolved. It argues there can be no confusion between the two names. “We believe the claims are without merit and we plan on defending them vigorously,” a spokesperson said. “We have no interest in settling this case.”

Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, will soon be just a tad smaller. This morning the company said it will sack a further 450 employees in its mobile services business, a division charged with developing and delivering the Ovi-branded Internet services tied to Nokia devices. Seems the still souring economy has undermined Nokia’s (NOK) ambitions in that area, and Apple’s (AAPL) success with the iPhone App Store has inspired it to look to third-party developers to bring new applications to its devices. Said Niklas Savander, Nokia’s executive vice president of services, “The planned changes are aimed at improving and simplifying the user experience of Nokia services, increasing opportunities for third party developers and other partners to create compelling services, and accelerating the development of a common platform for Nokia’s different service offerings.”

In other words, the planned changes are aimed at catching up with Apple. “As much as iPhone and App Store is a success for Apple, it’s a humiliating defeat for the rest of the mobile industry,” Bengt Nordstrom, chief executive of telecom consultant Northstream, told Reuters. “Twenty years of efforts from operators and vendors to create mobile applications that customers like is overtaken in a heartbeat by someone that never done it before.”

Overall, Nokia’s announcement is good news for mobile app developers, bad news for the ones handling them internally at Nokia. It’s not as if we didn’t see this coming, though. The econalypse has been having deleterious effects on Nokia. In January, the company warned that world-wide sales in ’09 are likely to fall 10 percent year-to-year. As CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo put it at the time, “the macro environment is challenging and, we believe, will remain so in 2009.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is going to turn the social network’s “stream” of user experiences and information into a revenue stream one way or another. And if that means allowing others to pan its waters for gold, then so be it.

And so, at an event in Palo Alto later today, Facebook will reportedly announce plans to open its stream to third-party developers, offering them the chance to build new services and applications outside the site that–with users’ permission–access the status updates, photos and videos uploaded by users. According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook will provide that access via an open standard and it will do it for free.

An attractive proposition for developers: Access to a community with some 200 million members where the only real barrier to entry is a user’s privacy settings. In the months ahead, we’ll undoubtedly see this give rise to countless new services in much the same way Twitter has spawned an ecosystem of developers.

In doing this, Facebook is positioning itself as a social data clearinghouse feeding a myriad of other third-party services. More importantly, by doing so, the social-networking behemoth is also acknowledging that we’re not likely to conduct all our social interactions in a single network.

But it’s also betting that we may be willing to conduct many of them through one. And in the end, that’s just as good–especially if that social network is Facebook.

UPDATE:

Moments ago Facebook announced the Open Stream API which will allow third party developers to create new apps and services that will allow users to read an interact with Facebook member streams without having to actually visit Facebook.

“The stream is the flow of information on Facebook, which manifests itself on a user’s home page as the News Feed and on the user’s profile as the Wall,” Facebook explains in its developer Wiki. “It represents the content a user shares with friends in a real-time setting. Initially the stream content appeared only on Facebook, and now with the Open Stream API, developers can connect to their users’ streams and let their users read their streams wherever they want. This means that for the first time, you can build new user interfaces for the stream everywhere including Web, mobile, and desktop applications.”

A bold move. And one that will almost certainly let some of the steam out of Twitter’s pistons.

It has not yet been given a price or a release date, but Palm’s forthcoming Pre handset continues to have a remarkably restorative effect on the company’s share price. It wasn’t so long ago that Palm shares were trading just above a dollar. Today, they’re hovering around $8.67, bouyed up by little more than the device’s Consumer Electronics Show debut, an uneventful media Webcast, some hyperbolic remarks from one of the company’s investors and the enthusiasm of a few bullish analysts. Among them, Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore and Jonathan Goldberg, who boosted their price target on Palm (PALM) to $12 from $10 today claiming that Palm will not only ship the device on schedule, but will follow it up with other form factors. “Since their earnings release last week, we have conducted a round of checks on Palm and remain confident in the potential for their new Pre smartphone to turnaround the company’s results,” the two wrote in a note. “The Pre timetable seems on track at least, and both carrier and developer interest remains high….We also confirmed earlier checks and vague hints on their recent call that the company is working on other form factors which we could see in the market sooner than expected.”

Quite a vote of confidence. Though to be fair, it’s not shared by everyone. Certainly, Needham analyst Charlie Wolf is looking askance at claims that the Pre will turn out to be Palm’s iPhone. “The stock appears fully valued even if the Pre turns into a stunning success,” he wrote in a recent research note. “To have management tell it, WebOS is the best thing since sliced bread and the Pre is a thing of beauty. Obviously, with the platform launch still weeks away, it’s impossible to challenge them.”

Not much of an improvement over “BlackBerry Application Center,” but an improvement nonetheless. A placeholder page for the yet-to-be launched mobile application storefront went live last night, along with a developer FAQ that reveals the store’s tiered pricing model. Like Apple’s App Store, BlackBerry App World will offer some apps for free, but it’s set the minimum price for paid apps at $2.99. That’s a $2 departure from Apple’s 99-cent minimum price and it has generated no end of jawing among tech observers. But does anyone really believe that RIM’s business customers will balk at a $2.99 minimum price point? And in the end, isn’t a higher minimum price point better for developers? At worst, it might potentially discourage the development of smaller throwaway apps. But it might also make App World a bit more financially intriguing to iPhone-obsessed developers. And that certainly can’t hurt.

Of course, there’s a danger in that: code forking. With so many developers working on Android’s code–all with unique views of what it is and what it should do–there’s a possibility that the platform could fragment into multiple versions spread across innumerable vertical devices. A confusing prospect for consumers. Google aims to combat this with a nonfragmentation agreement that asks developers not to “modify [the Android code] in noncompatible ways.” While that should prevent some developers from forking Android’s code, it surely won’t prevent all of them.

[Image Credit: Rich Dellinger]

“We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work,” Apple (AAPL) explained in a statement posted to its Developer Program site. “It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others. However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software.”

Adobe (ADBE) has conceived of a way for search engines to index Flash content, even pre-existing Flash content, without the need for developer intervention. It’s made content encoded in the Flash file format (SWF), which was previously undiscoverable to search engines, discoverable–and it’s given Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) the tools necessary to discover it.

As Ryan Stewart, an Adobe evangelist, explained: “We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google, which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information.”

Google will begin doing that today; Yahoo, whenever it manages. A big change for both companies, especially Google, which has long advised Webmasters concerned about their PageRank to use Flash sparingly. “In general, search engines are text based,” the company explains in its “Creating a Google-friendly site” FAQ. “This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.”

Today that changes. And now, developers can use Flash to their hearts’ content, without mucking about with workarounds to ensure the dynamic content it makes possible is properly indexed and ranked.

When the search giant announced its Android mobile platform last November, it said devices running it would arrive at market by the second half of this year. Well, turns out that deadline was a bit aggressive. Android-based handsets may not be available until the fourth quarter of this year–if Google’s (GOOG) lucky. Because some handset manufacturers are “struggling” to meet even that extended deadline. And at least a few wireless carriers have abandoned plans to launch Android-based handsets this year entirely.

Apparently, a multinational consortium of companies working to develop an open mobile platform–while a wonderful idea in theory–is, in practice, a pain in the ass. Software providers are finding it difficult to develop programs on a platform still going through revisions. Handset manufacturers are having a tough time integrating that software into their devices. And wireless carriers are finding that customizing Android to promote their Internet services isn’t as easy as they’d hoped. “This is where the pain happens,” Andy Rubin, director of mobile platforms at Google, said of this particular phase of development. “We are very, very close.”

Sadly for the Google, the pain to which Rubin refers seems decidedly Android-specific. Developers building applications for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone 3G, which will launch in early July, seem to be having an easy time of it. So much so that some are prioritizing iPhone apps over their Android counterparts–at least until Android development is painless.