There’s generally two main profit drivers that lead people into the adventure the development of a mobile apps entails. You either create an app with a great deal of utility that people would be lost without and you sell it for a “premium” fee in various app stores, making your profits from the fruits of your better-than-the-competition innovation. The other way is, of course, to make your app FREE, give it away to the largest audience possible and then monetize those “eyeballs” by serving up mobile ads.

Apple sent shivers through the mobile advertising market a couple months back when they warned that they would be limiting ads in iDevices to only ads from “independent networks” in addition to their in-house iAds platform. To this date, they haven’t followed through on those plans, which could be a side effect of the FTC looking into their business practices.

Leena Rao has a run-down over at TechCrunch and tries to predict what may be some of the unfortunate consequences of this mobile ads arms race:

So in the coming year, we could see the top three smartphone device makers all have their own mobile ad networks. And RIM’s ad network could also be prohibited from serving ads on the iPhone with Apple’s policies. The result of this would be a more device-centric, fragmented, mobile advertising market. Already Steve Jobs is promoting Apple’s iAds as a revolutionary ad format optimized for the iPhone and iPad. RIM and Google could be forced to develop and tout their device-centric ad formats.

And thus, advertisers would be encouraged to go to each device manufacturer for the ad formats that promise the best clickthrough rates. It would be a nightmare however for advertisers and agencies to have to split their spending between all the different networks. Advertisers hate fragmentation. They love scale: buy once, plaster everywhere.

Are you watching these developments closely in order to assess the possible impact it could have on your mobile project? Are you just now diving in and this could have an effect on your potential business model? Tell us about it in the comments and let us know what you’re doing to prepare for future scenarios.