If you play with the various mobile platforms out there such as Android, LiMo, S60 etc., the one thing you will notice is that application development frameworks on these platforms are quite immature. One of the big advantages of having a framework is to not have to write custom code to reason with a new resource type. JDBC essentially created the whole application server market. We need something like that for mobile applications as well.
Mobile frameworks are essentially client side libraries that hide the myriads of APIs that are available to access resources over the web.