While the concept of App Stores is fast gaining ground across the globe the competitive advantage is expected to rest with those who are able to attract third party application developers in big numbers as it increases the count of their App Store applications offerings.

A new study by Ovum highlights some interesting observations related to third party application developers.

According to the findings, 60% of application developers use or plan to use Google’s server-side API to build applications. Collective share of mobile operators is way behind at 25%.

Michele Mackenzie, independent industry analyst at Ovum, say, “This is not surprising as Google, leveraging its dominance in the Internet domain, is fast establishing itself as a strong partner in the mobile applications environment.”

“Given that mobile operators have put increasing efforts behind API exposure it is perhaps disappointing that only 25% of the respondents were supporting or planned to support mobile network operator APIs; particularly when 31% of our sample was using or planned to use Facebook APIs. This clearly illustrates that mobile operators have their work cut out but it is still early days and they are not out of the race.

Some of the parameters looked upon by third party application developers while selecting a platform include ease of development (70%) followed by breadth of platform functionality (69%), good-quality SDKs (68%), and flexibility/innovation (63%).

Apple’s App Store tops the chart for actual channel partners with 74% of respondents distributing or planning to distribute their applications through it. Android Market, BlackBerry App World, and Windows Marketplace for Mobile all scored well with more than 50% of the sample supporting them, says Ovum.

Eden Zoller, Principal Analyst,  comments that “Rather surprisingly the operator portal or application store was not, as one might have expected, the poor relation to the device vendor stores.” A respectable 51% of respondents were using the operator as a channel or planned to do so. “Operators are generally perceived as good channel partners because they provide many of the core partner attributes and also support some or all of the devices offered by their rivals listed above.”

For distributing applications, reach (32)  is the top priority of application developers followed by local presence (12%) and technical support (10%).

Ovum surveyed 217 application developers.