The iPad rocks, Android tablets are determined to catch up, and everyone’s mixed up in some legal battle involving patents, code, or something of the sort.  Got it.  But as summer winds down and a new season approaches, what does the mobile industry have to look forward to?

We’ve seen a few major developments since Q1 that have greatly affected the mobile space, namely the coming of the iCloud, steady Honeycomb updates, and new entrants from the likes of HP, Mozilla and even some foreign competition on the other side of the world. Third party app markets are on the rise, with Amazon’s clear plans to take a good portion of the Android space, cloud companies extending app hubs to promote their own services, and a huge push around file syncing, sharing and backup. The common denominator here is the consumer, driving IT trends from the developer to the networking end.

Apple and Google (and all the others) have had a strong focus on the software side of things, turning their resources to products and services with distinct consumer appeal. Developers are focusing less on which platform to build on and recognizing that a consumer-driven business plan involves cross-platform support and a backend infrastructure grounded in the cloud. The mobile battle is in fact moving to the cloud, where all the players, large and small, want your data, from your work files to your media to your transactions.

This is the biggest trend Appcelerator picked up on in its Q3 Mobile Developer Report, surveying approximately 2,000 developers within its Titanium app development platform. In conjunction with the International Data Corporation (IDC), the report uncovers an emerging life cycle for mobile engagement, which many developers and platform owners seem to be concentrating their efforts around. From awareness to engagement, onto monetization and loyalty, there’s new standards sprouting from this life cycle, changing the way we create and interact with apps.

The utilitarian nature of mobile apps means there’s potential for high integration with individual devices, taking advantage of the unique features an iPad versus an Android Evo versus an iPhone versus a BlackBerry have to offer. This also means mobile apps have a higher level of engagement with users, and now that our mobile app ecosystem has become more established. Social interaction plays a big role here, as many app developers indicate an interest in social networking APIs for integration purposes.

One of the surprising results was the high level of interest in the Google+ platform, which has yet to even offer an API for mobile developers. But in the coming 12-18 months, mobile app developers are looking to Google+ for two main reasons: its association with existing Google products (search, maps, YouTube, Places), trumping Facebook’s social graph with 68% developer support, and Google+’s level of innovation (Circles, Hangouts, Spark), gaining 49% of respondents vote over Facebook. The expectations of Google+’s integration with Android took 40% of surveyed developers, while 26% felt that Google+ has a better user experience than Facebook.

While Google+ is making a great deal of headway in terms of developer interest, Facebook is still the top pick for current mobile app integration, taking 83% of the surveyed market. Twitter follows at 73%, with Google+ a close third at 72%. Trailing from a distance are LinkedIn and Foursquare, at 30% and 23% respectively. Not surprisingly, the primary uses for social network integration follow suit, with notifications topping the list at 52% and status updates at 49%. Log-ins, messaging and news updates follow at 44%, 38% and 35%, with location- and photo-sharing and friend requests bottoming out the list with 32%, 31% and 26% respectively.

What this shows is that the faddish tendencies around location-based social interaction is not what drives engagement or traffic around most mobile apps in Appcelerator’s network. As engagement becomes more important to developers, social actions that reel users back into the apps, as opposed to sending their activity back out from the app, is what really matters.

There’s good reason for pulling users back into apps, as in-app activity is being monetized to a greater extent. Trends around in-app purchases, NFC integration, virtual goods and advertising means that in-app engagement can be more readily converted into monetization. It’s something that’s really taking off in the gaming industry, with the average amount spent in-app reaching $14. Apple’s certainly got its eye on in-app purchases, enforcing its revised rules around in-app links and transactions for the digital publishing industry in particular. It’s an area Android can really leverage, providing a freer market than Apple and incorporating its primary strength–advertising–for developer benefits.

It’s no longer enough to get a mobile user to buy your app. You have to keep them coming back, and keep them around for longer periods of time. It’s an evolution pattern quite similar to the rise of websites and social networks, especially when it comes to monetization. And as the consumer becomes the center of attention for app developers and platform owners alike, the cloud also rises in importance. Keeping data and providing services through the cloud is a necessity for delivering the app experience consumers demand, with cross-device, anytime access. This need on the developer end will drive up the use of cloud services like Amazon, validating the efforts these cloud companies have been building up in recent years.

As the mobile battle heads to the cloud, it’s the cloud providers that will really win big. Appcelerator asked its mobile developers which cloud services they’ll be connecting to in the next 12-18months, and Amazon and iCloud nearly tied at 51% and 50% respectively. iCloud is the point of interest here, considering it hasn’t launched yet, but the perception is that it will be easy to use, and an integral aspect of Apple’s overall strategy for mobile moving forward. Windows Azure is far behind at 20%, with RedHat taking 17%, Salesforce Heroku at 16%, Engine Yard at 6% and Cloud Bees at 5%.