Apple's App Store beats Ovi, Android

Apple's App Store is beating the Android marketplace and Nokia's Ovi in terms of the number, variety and appeal of available applications, a survey has found.

Apple's offering is also ahead of Microsoft's Mobile Skymarket, the Blackberry Apps Storefront and Palm's webOS Software Store, according to research firm Global Intelligence Alliance (GIA).

GIA compared the competing stores by five success factors - time to market, the ability to attract developers, the rate of device adoption, quality of user experience and having a critical mass of attractive applications.

Apple's store matched or beat all its competitors in all factors apart from the speed of device adoption and rollout, where it was beaten by Ovi. Palm's offering scored the lowest, with Blackberry's storefront placing second last.