Nokia have just announced that their downloads from their app store have reached 3 million a day. That’s over 90 million Ovi Store downloads per month. At the same time the number of registered developers with Nokia has shot up to 400,000. The Finnish company put much of it down to the latest Symbian OS and the availability of apps such a Swype. It’s all pretty good going. But how does that compare with iPhone app downloads?

The last published figure from Apple earlier this year was 280 million downloads per month, or just over 9 million per day. In spite of the Ovi Store catching up quickly, Apple is still seing three times as many downloads. However, Nokia are the world’s largest handset manufacturer (with Apple in 4th), so perhaps a more telling way is to look at the number of downloads per handset. This is not an easy task. For starters, Nokia sells a majority of basic handsets and although they may be capable of downloading apps, most of their users buy them to make calls and send texts. Similarly, the Apple figures also include the iPod Touch. Most of those users will buy the device in preference to an iPod precisely because they can download and play games. Although the downloads are relevant, the Touch isn’t a a mobile phone.

The other problem is we don’t know how many of each device is in circulation. iPhones and iPod touches, we could guess at around 100 million currently in use (that’s taking sales and taking off upgrades and older models). That would mean around 0.09 per day per user or 2.7 per user per month.

Nokia is even harder. We know that they sell around three times as many smartphones as Apple, but that doesn’t tell us how many are out there. Lets say there are 65 million iPhones (not Touches) in use, the Nokia figure will be around three times that at 195 million.  That’s 0.02 downloads per user per day, or 0.6 downloads per user per month. That means Apple users download 5 times more than Nokia’s. And when you look at the bottom line, profit, Apple is way ahead of their competitors.

As with any stats, you can make of them what you want, but it looks like Nokia have a long way to go before they can challenge Apple’s premier position. (There’s more on the OviStore stats here)