The Mobile World Congress met in Barcelona this week. Think of it as the United Nations of mobile technology companies — with about as much ability to influence world events as the real United Nations.

The biggest deal coming out of the 2010 Congress was “App Planet.” The idea was to lay out a vision for unified standards that would make life better for developers and customers. The official website says: By pulling all the key players together in one place at one time, we will make App Planet the new Centre of the Apps Universe for the four days of Mobile World Congress.

Only problem: key player #1 — Apple — did not attend the conference. So it seems that the real point of Planet Of The Apps was to do collectively what no one has been able to do alone: create a credible challenge to Apple’s world-leading app platform. If nothing else, it allowed 200 companies to take some time off from brutalizing each other in the normal course of business.

Given the importance of App Planet to this gathering, it surprised many when Steve Jobs was named recipient of the Congress’s Mobile Personality of the Year Award. Yes, the same Steve Jobs who will never in a million years support the global app standards being developed by this brotherly group. I guess they just like his personality.

It’s not like they didn’t have the chance to honor one of their own. The nominees beaten by Steve Jobs were the bigshots of the planetary app movement: Eric Schmidt (CEO, Google), Mike Lazaridis (co-CEO, Research In Motion) and Pete Chou (CEO, HTC). Apple sent no one to collect the award, indicating their respect for this particular honor.

I really don’t have anything against technology companies banding together to move things forward. I just think it’s safe to say that if any of the participating companies were in Apple’s position today, they’d be as far away from this Congress as possible — even if it meant not being on hand to pick up the Mobile Personality of the Year award.