During the last year, the market for smart phones has exploded. This includes: Blackberrys, Windows Mobile phones, Google Android phones and the almighty iPhone. These phones grabbed the attention of the masses of people who wouldn’t usually have purchased a smart phone and things have never been the same.

Suddenly words like app and 4G are commonplace in conversation. Mobile phones in some ways have become a sort of status symbol in society. You can go for the Blackberry business look or try for the cool, hip iPhone user. And then there’s the somewhat cool, somewhat geeky Google Phone, running the Google Android operating system.

Google Android began its rise to fame with the release of the Motorola Droid in late 2009. Although initially received as a cheap, not as good alternative to the iPhone, the operating system itself evolved.

Google began releasing updates, making the operating system appealing to developers and with that came better, higher quality apps popping up on their app store. As time went on, newer, faster hardware has come out, including the Samsung Galaxy S, the Droid X and the HTC Evo.

So, at last Google has the formula for success: an awesome OS, an app store getting better by the day and an amazing lineup of the best phones available.

Right? Wrong.

Unlike the iPhone, which is on one carrier and is hardly touched by AT&T, Google Android is on all carriers, all manufacturers and on a range of devices from phones to tablets.

This means each carrier and manufacturer is adding their special touch to the phone. And what is the special touch you might ask? Disabling features, adding in separate app stores and adding in third-party themes and skins you can hardly turn off.

The appeal of the Google Android operating systems to manufacturers, carriers and customers is how open it is. Open source usually means open code, free software and a better product long term; this is not the case.

What the carriers are trying to do is launch third-party app stores of their own.

On many Android phones, the carrier already has a special section with apps specific to your phone. This can be nice; say, for example, to find apps that back-up your contacts to the carrier’s website. Now each carrier, most recently Verizon, wants to differentiate themselves even more by launching their own app. However, this app is different from all others in the sense it isn’t even an app at all, it’s a separate app store.

As if getting developers to make apps for the Google Marketplace wasn’t hard enough, now there’s a separate app store for each carrier, and even more recently Electronic Arts wants to start their own app store too.

If this keeps up, the Google Marketplace could be empty with thousands of app stores all with different apps on different phones, and lose any ground it had made in the last year.

Most importantly, it would have lost any chance of taking down the phone that started this all: the iPhone.

It’s up to Google at this point. They need to ask themselves, do we want to play with the big kids and begin enforcing tighter guidelines for carriers and apps, or do we want to stick to our roots and let open source and open markets sort themselves out.