• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, March 10, 2011

There's been a bunch of forecasts lately about how many apps will be downloaded this year, next year or in the next five years. And projections of how much revenue they'll generate. But ABI Research today released actual  app download totals for the major smartphone platforms. While Android has come on strong in the last year, Apple still dominates the category.

The iPhone racked up 5.6 billion downloads by the end of 2010, compared to nearly 7.9 billion total downloads from all stores during the year. (The App Store recently crossed 10 billion downloads to date.) By contrast, Android Market, which offers 130,000 titles in 48 countries, combined with third-party platforms, had 1.9 billion downloads in 2010.

The Android Market also won't get much help in the near term from publicity surrounding the recent malware attack it suffered, which led Google to pull 55 apps from the catalog and remotely disable infected apps that had already been downloaded.

BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion, which has been discounted as a serious threat in the smartphone market to Apple and Google, has nevertheless been making a conscious effort to boost its footprint in the apps world by pushing into more than 100 markets, according to ABI. BlackBerry app downloads surpassed a more than 1 billion as of December.

The research firm notes that the app market is heating up even more in 2011, with new competitors and investment capital pouring in. ABI analyst Neil Strother, for instance, pointed to India's Idea Cellular, which just launched its Online Application Store, and multi-platform app store GetJar raising almost $25 million in a recent funding round.

Further underscoring the intensifying competition, GetJar this week pulled the Opera Mini browser from its mobile storefront after Opera announced launching its own app store within its mobile browsers. And despite the recent malware scare, the Android should prove a growing rival to Apple's hegemony in apps as the Google platform extends to more and more handsets. The ABI report noted Android smartphone quarterly shipments have overtaken Apple's. In the U.S., data from comScore and Nielsen this week also showed Android has become the top smartphone OS, with 31.2% market share.