Applications are among smartphone platforms' biggest attractions for consumers, Market Force notes, and they are spurring overall market adoption. That's obviously why all the major mobile platforms' app stores are rapidly expanding -- what's surprising is just how fast they're doing that.

In fact, the Android Market is exploding in size particularly quickly. Whereas revenues from Apple's App Store increased 131.9 percent between 2009 and 2010, the Android Market blew that away with an 861.5 percent increase during that time, according to several this week citing worldwide research firm IHS.

Along the way, Apple's market dominance slipped from 93 percent in 2009 to 83 percent in 2010, while Android's grew from 1.3 percent to 4.7 percent. Nokia's Ovi Store, by comparison, grew by 719 percent between 2009 and 2010, while BlackBerry App World grew by 360 percent, according to the IHS data.

The Android Market is also growing faster in terms of the number of applications it includes. The Apple App Store doubled in size during 2010 to almost 300,000 applications, according to a last month from research firm Distimo. Yet Google's Android Market grew to almost 130,000, which is six times the number it had a year ago. BlackBerry App World and Nokia Ovi Store offer 18,000 and 25,000 applications, respectively.

This latest round of data supports what Lookout Mobile Security's App Genome Project , too. According to Lookout's data, the volume of apps in the Android Market has increased by 127 percent since August of last year, compared with just 44 percent for the App Store. If that rate continues, the Android Market will surpass the App Store in volume by mid-2012, Lookout predicts.