Nokia announced yesterday that the Ovi Store now reaches up to five million downloads per day. Ovi Store now contains more than 40,000 content items, representing an eight fold increase in the catalogue since last year, with approximately 1,000 additional items being added every week. Symbian^3 devices (N8, C6-01, C7 and E7) are responsible for 15% of daily downloads (750,000 per day). Read on for charts and analysis.

The 5 million downloads a day rate annualises to 1.825 billion downloads a year. The daily download rate has been growing steadily for the last 18 months, as illustrated in the charts below:
  

All About Symbian's tracking estimates that there have been around 1.2 billion cumulative downloads from Ovi Store since it launched in June 2009. Of these more than 1 billion have been in the last 12 months, and around 400 million in the first three months of 2011. Based on growth trends over the last year and likely future patterns, we predict that Ovi Store will reach 2 billion cumulative downloads in August 2011 and 3 billion cumulative downloads by the end of the year.

In the press release announcing the milestone, Nokia also highlighted the monetisation opportunities available through Ovi Store. Operator billing is now active with 112 operators in 36 markets (25 times more than Nokia's nearest competitor). Nokia has found that operator billing increases consumer transactions (sales) by up to four times compared to credit card billing, but this does vary from market to market. Nokia is currently beta testing in-app billing and in-app advertising programs, which it says will deliver additional revenue channels and opportunities for developers.

Nokia also noted that a refresh for the Series 40 Ovi Store client, which brought it in line with the experience on Symbian^3 devices, resulted in a 35% increase in downloads in the last two months, highlighting the importance of a good user experience in an application store client. Series 40 makes up "about a quarter of the total downloads" (1.25 million per day).

As a result of the growth in downloads, 158 developers in 41 countries have now achieved more than one million downloads for their apps. These include:

• Breakdesign, from Singapore, a game developer with titles such as That Roach Game South Africa and Dawn of the Fly, has reached 6.5 million downloads.
    
• Gedda-Heads, from Denmark, has created a social gaming community with strong chat and online elements. It has achieved 1.3 million downloads across more than 190 countries. 
    
• Syntonetic, also from Denmark, has developed Moodagent, to automatically create playlists. It has been downloaded more than 4 million times. 
    
• PiZero, a theme developer from Italy, has passed the 7 million download mark.
   
• PicoBrothers, a two man developer team from Belgium, with numerous applications and games in the Ovi Store, recently passed the 20 million download mark.