In what could give a big boost to iPad and iPhone development for enterprise applications, a latest study by ABI Research predicts that users of enterprise smartphone and media tablet mobile apps to grow to exceed 830 million active users by 2016. Apple’s App Store has over 400,000 applications and leads the app market.

The report cites smartphone and media tablet adoption at enterprises as the reason behind the surge in enterprise app development and deployment. However, Enterprise Practice Director Dan Shey says, “Mobile suppliers are providing the critical enablers boosting app adoption.”

Two important supply-side drivers, mobile suppliers and cloud services in mobile apps are fuelling the adoption of apps in enterprises. The supplier market offering app platforms has grown. These platforms enable an app to be developed once and deployed across multiple devices in the highly fragmented market. Many platforms also provide highly cost-effective capabilities like management and system integration. Secondly, many mobile app developers also offer cloud services as a component of the app thereby reducing the investment for organizations.

The higher adoption of mobility solutions and mobile applications in organizations would surely boost enterprise level app development as app usage in organization goes increasing.

Alcatel-Lucent today announced that OpenPlug Studio (previously OpenPlug ELIPS Studio) will now be available free of charge to iPhone app developers.  OpenPlug Studio is a development toolkit that allows iPhone developers to proficiently build native applications for smart phones, tablets and other web-connected devices using popular web development technologies like JavaScript, ActionScript and XML. iPhone app developers can download OpenPlug Studio at http://developer.openplug.com

Alcatel-Lucent also launched a Certified OpenPlug Solutions Provider Program that focuses on mobile app development and developer training.  This program will help mobile app developers on how to use the OpenPlug tools, while building enterprise apps that run across platforms or devices and power service providers’ network-based APIs.

“One of the things we set out to do when we created the Open API Platform was address the entire API and app ecosystem,” said Laura Merling, senior vice president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Enablement Strategy and Platform.

“Making OpenPlug Studio free puts one of the industry’s most powerful tools into the hands of more developers.  And building a formal partner program further supports the need across all industries to provide the education and tools to meet the demands of the connected business,” he added.

These two initiatives from the company will surely accelerate iPhone app development and aid iphone app developers in building powerful apps.

Head of Tap Tap Tap revealed in a blog post that only 5 percent of the app users opt for in-app purchases. He writes “When we released Camera+ 2, we added the “I ♥ Analog” effects pack as an in-app purchase for 99¢. While it provides some nice supplemental income, it ultimately is only purchased by around 5% of Camera+ purchasers on a given day.”

“So while almost $70k over roughly a 4.5 month period is absolutely nothing to sneeze at, it’s a relatively small amount compared to what Camera+ earns through sales of the app itself. Like I said… supplemental income. There are companies with free photography apps that are trying to have their business models revolve around selling effects via in-app purchases, but it’s very unlikely that this can be an effective business model,”he added.

Most experts believe in-app purchases to be the alternate revenue source in future for iPhone developers. Many iPhone developers are following the in-app model where they release free apps and then hope to earn from in-app promotions and purchases.

He also challenged reports that apps are quickly discarded by giving data for Camera+ upgrades where half of the buyers upgraded the app within 6 days of its release.

As we all know iPhone development is generally done using xCode. However, there are other options for iPhone Development as well. Recently Adobe CS5 was released which can also be used to develop an iPhone app.

Just before the release, Apple released iPhone OS 4 SDKs with changes in policy. It’s clearly written in the new policy agreement that from here onward Apple will not accept apps for iPhone written using Adobe CS5 or Mono Touch cross-compilers or any other cross-compilers.

This was first spotted by John Gruber, who later posted on his blog about how this move of Apple is better for iPhone development from a user’s and iPhone application developer’s perspective.This issue gained a further new height when Steve Jobs and CEO of TaoEffect, Greg Slepak’s conversation was revealed on Mashable and many other sites.

On a brief research on the web, you’ll easily find different iPhone developers have different thoughts on this new policy. However, most well known developers of iPhone say that it’s a must for Apple Inc. to have such new policy to continue to deliver same user experience which users had since the beginning of iPhone’s launch.