“It’s Mobile World Congress week in Barcelona… and the shadow of Apple’s iPhone once again looms large,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “This year, what’s getting the love is the iTunes App Store, with its 20,000-plus applications and half a billion downloads.”

Among the announcements making headlines this week:
• Nokia’s Ovi Store
• Windows Marketplace
• App Store for Symbian
• Android Market
• BlackBerry Applications Center
• Palm Software Store

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Why don’t each of these companies just erect a neon sign on their company headquarters that brightly blinks “Derivative Followers” for all the world to see? It would serve the same purpose.