RIM says its BlackBerry App World is recording an average of 2 million application downloads per day, an increase from the 1.5 million the company reported back in September 2010. At the end of last month, Nokia announced that its Ovi Store is running at 3 million total downloads per day, although the figure consists of other content as well as apps. The company has previously said 70 percent of its total downloads are apps, a calculation which would mean the Ovi Store is generating 2.1 million app downloads per day — just narrowly ahead of BlackBerry App World’s 2 million figure. Such an analysis confirms there is a neck-and-neck race between RIM and Nokia who are duelling for third and fourth place in the vendor app store stakes (behind leader Apple’s App Store and second-place Android Market).

The two companies have been locked in their close contest for some months. Nokia announced that it was achieving 2.3 million total downloads per day on October 1, a figure which equates to 1.6 million daily app downloads. Just two weeks earlier RIM said it had hit 1.5 million daily downloads. RIM revealed this week’s app figures via a conference call for BlackBerry developers. On the same call, Mike Kirkup, RIM’s director of developer relations, revealed that the BlackBerry App World client has been downloaded a total of 40 million times since launch. Earlier this week, RIM also announced that it now has 15,000 apps in BlackBerry App World. Although Nokia does not publicly reveal the number of apps available in its Ovi Store, analytics firm Distimo pegs it at around 28,000.