Skeptical about developing iPhone apps, which we've identified as a hot industry for tech start-ups? Well a bit of recent bullish news may change your mind: namely, users of Apple's 12 million extant iPhones have downloaded over 100 million apps in only two months of their availabilty--more than twice as many as songs were downloaded from iTunes during that period. TechCrunch, er, crunches the numbers, and finds that the current rase see 1 billion apps downloaded a full year faster than the first 1 billion songs were downloaded from iTunes.

In a separate post, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington provides a useful corrective to skeptics who note (not incorrectly) that Apple is more restrictive than many tech entrepreneurs would like in terms of which applications it allows into the sacred Application Store. (Google, by contrast, has pledged to make the applications for its forthcoming Android operating system truly open source.) Arrington's not in the Apple-defending business, and he doesn't disappoint here.

But he nonetheless accurately shows how foolhardy it would be to give up on this growing and potentially lucrative market just because Apple's being too strict. "The fact is that there are more than twelve million iPhones in people’s hands today, and another 800,000 or so are likely sold each week," Arrington writes. "That is too much of an opportunity to pass up. Developers will complain, but ultimately they’ll play by whatever rules Apple demands. Even if those rules are ambiguous and subject to change regularly without notice."

As an additional point, though, at least if we are to have faith in capitalism and the whole notion of the way open source works, we should posit that Apple will move more towards a more truly open open source model in the future rather than away from one. Why? Open source works: everyone knows this. And now, faced with a competitor that offers a similar product but with truly openly sourced apps--that would be Android--Apple is going to have to adapt and evolve to stay competitive; if it doesn't, Google will trounce it. To quote Austin Powers: "Groovy...smashing...yay capitalism!"