Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia, said in the company’s fourth-quarter results conference call that there are 30,000 apps now available via the vendor’s Ovi Store. This is believed to be the first time the company has officially announced a figure for the number of products available, although various analyst reports have suggested figures in the 25,000–28,000 range. While Elop specifically used the word “apps” in the call, Ovi Store also sells some other content products, which are traditionally included in its download figures. For example, in the Q4 results presentation, Nokia said that 4 million products are downloaded daily from Ovi Store. Using its previously given metric that 70 percent of these are apps, this gives a total of 2.8 million software downloads per day.

Among the vendor app store battle, Nokia’s closest rival is generally seen as RIM’s BlackBerry App World, which has around 16,000 apps available, and around 2 million downloads per day. Coming from a standing start late in 2010, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform has 6,500 apps available – daily download figures have not been released. All three of these are dwarfed by Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market, as well as independent store GetJar.

What no vendor has so-far detailed is how the apps available from the various stores are monetised, including the split between paid-for and free titles. According to a recent survey from Distimo, while in 2010 there was a 258 percent increase in the number of apps in Ovi Store, the number of free titles grew by 899 percent.