What is Canada's Top Rated Mobile News App? You'll be surprised

The Globe and Mail iPad app picked up the Best in Digital Publishing Award earlier this week at the Digi Awards. But are they the people's favorite?

It doesn't look like it.

Last week Toronto's Spreed analyzed app store ratings to determine the Top Rated Canadian Mobile News App for 2011 and you may be surprised to learn who came out on top.

Even though there are problems with the app store review mechanisms, app reviews and position in the app store are still one of the best ways to gauge whether an app is worth downloading and how well it is doing in the store.

Being focused entirely on providing a customizable integrated Mobile Publishing and Monetization platform, we often don’t take the time to look at how our Apps perform against other providers. So during some downtime on a commute, our resident Data Czar, Dan Kershaw, wanted to see how our Clients have been performing in Canada.

Dan went and grabbed the Top 20 list of Canadian Newspapers, and went looking for their apps in the iTunes (Apple) Store and the Android Market, and copied down the ratings found as of the end of November 2011.

There you have it - Metro's mobile app is the most “positively rated newspaper app” in Canada with 57% of Canadians rating the Metro App giving it 4 or 5 stars.

While we should probably take Spreed's conclusion with a grain of salt (they are currently in a dispute with The Globe and Mail over premature termination of a contract), numbers don't lie. Metro has done a superior job of engaging their readers AND encouraging them to rate their app.

What's your favorite Canadian Mobile News App?