With the increasingly fragmented mobile platform market, developers, who are facing limited resources in the down economy, are having to carefully place their bets on which platforms they think will succeed. Mark Lowenstein, an mobile analyst and consultant, described the problem on a panel during the Dow Jones’ Wireless Innovations conference. The WSJ reported that he said even the iPhone isn’t a fail-safe pick. “A lot of developers are having to make bets, choosing one or two platforms and seeing how it goes,” he said. “But as a result, the market potential gets distributed—even the most successful apps in the iPhone app store reach 20% of iPhone users, or 1% of the market where the iPhone is available….So we’re still in this experimental stage.”

That sparked a debate among panelists on whether developers should target just a couple of platforms, or whether they should port their application to all. Accel Partners’ Rich Wong said developers should develop for the handset that best delivers their experience, for instance, an enterprise application should choose BlackBerry, Symbian or Windows Mobile. Shawn Carolan, a managing director at Menlo Ventures, disagreed, saying that in order to gain scale, you can’t tie your application to one platform. He provided TeleNav, one of his portfolio companies, as an example. The navigation application is supporting all platforms, “so someone like AT&T (NYSE: T) who wants to solve navigation as a problem for all of their subs can go to one company for that.”

Shasta Ventures Managing Director Robert Coneybeer, made the most dramatic statement in favor of the iPhone. “Yeah, there are only 13 million iPhone handsets out there, but when you take that and multiply that times the amount of usage, you’re talking about much bigger market share. And at least what we’re seeing, developers are employing a strategy for the iPhone plus something else…I actually think it’s possible the iPhone is under-hyped.”