The Android market copped some flack last week as developer Gameloft “significantly” cut its investment in the platform after the firm’s finance director claimed that the store isn’t neat enough – and that Android just isn’t lucrative enough for big businesses.

The burgeoning Android app scene, though, suggests that Gameloft and its ilk won’t be missed.

After all the market, as deficient as it is, still offers hundreds of applications made by talented individuals and fast-moving small companies, and the growth of the store – which has seen 94% more app projects started in October than in September – almost certainly has more to do with them than with the occasional big company, like Gameloft, gracing us with its presence.

I know that many of my favourite apps have been developed by intrepid individuals rather than the multi-million pound companies that are flocking to the iPhone.

Take the BBC News app, which is the second most popular news application on Android and was developed by Jim Blackler, a software engineer who now works at Google but who used to program games for the Sega Megadrive and Saturn.

Or Richard Gruet, the man who’s coded mobile internet tool 3G Watchdog. It’s the only application he appears to have written, but it helps thousands of people avoid hideous charges for going over their data limits.

The fourth most popular application on all of Android, BeebPlayer, is also the work of one man: games developer Dave Johnson, who works on the tool in his spare time.

Stories like this litter the marketplace. Vivian Aranha has developed nearly 60 games for iPhone and Android, with the bulk of them released on Google’s OS, and the enigmatic Pete C has created the London Tube Status app, which places information about every London Underground line on my home screen.

Dale Jefferson has gathered together most of the world’s prominent newspapers into one handy app, and an Austrian by the name of Bernd Bindreiter has released a live football scores tool that’s easier to use, in my opinion, than Google’s equivalent.

Small companies are making waves, too: Sadko Mobile, which employs five people, has released a superb blogging tool called AndroBlogger, and Australian firm ChompSMS has created a text messaging tool far more versatile than Android’s own.

Twitter client TwiDroid has been created by entrepreneurs Ralph Zimmerman and Thomas Marba, MathPad software has developed the immensely useful Unit Converter, and MyTrainTimes Lite – which has proved more useful than Network Rail in the past – is also developed by a small firm, Croworc.

In fact, the number of applications that I use from huge companies is tiny: aside from a handful of Google’s own apps, there’s IM client eBuddy, Mippin’s Buzz Deck and augmented reality app Layar, which is more curiosity than essential.

It seems that Google wants to encourage this kind of development, too, with its Android Developer Challenger distributing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the platform’s most promising coders. It’s a far cry from the iPhone’s app store, which has Apple’s famously stringent verification procedure. While it’s a barrier to entry which most large firms can easily leapfrog, it’s far more difficult for intrepid individuals to make waves. Typically, it’s also more expensive: being a member of Apple’s Developer Program costs $99 a year, with the one-off Android developer registration fee a quarter of this.

A handful of big firms might be doing well but Gameloft, by way of contrast, hasn’t had much success in the games market: while most of its releases cost between $2 and $3, the market is dominated by free titles. Out of Android’s top 200 games, only one of them demands a fee – a $3 game called Robo Defence, which is 152^nd in the charts. And even then the free, limited version is the 7^th most popular game in the market.

It seems that there’s a difference in mindset between the app stores for iPhone and Android – while Apple’s platform is crammed with big companies and small developers looking to make a fast buck, the Android market seems to be home to plenty of developers and companies to whom innovation is just as important as profit.

Gameloft, on the other hand, has an Android portfolio that severely lacks imagination, with Sudoku, Poker and Solitaire games sitting alongside titles that have already appeared on other platforms. Plenty of other people, meanwhile, have bypassed the market’s obvious limitations with good apps, proving that it can be done if you don’t rely on lazy and uninspired ideas.

If Gameloft doesn’t feel that it can compete with the thousands of useful, innovative and free applications contributed by hundreds of eager developers, then good riddance – it won’t be missed.