A US appeals court overturned a preliminary injunction on the sale of Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy Nexus smartphone yesterday, dealing a setback to Apple in its battle against Google’s increasingly popular mobile software.

Apple is waging war on several fronts against Google, whose Android software powers many of Samsung’s devices.

In one of the more visible developments of that battle, Apple scored a sweeping legal victory over Samsung in August when a US jury found Samsung had copied critical features of the hugely popular iPhone and iPad and awarded Apple $1.05 billion in damages.

In this case, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that Apple failed to prove that consumers purchased the Samsung product because of the infringing technology. The court considered a single patent — one which allows the smartphone to search multiple data storage locations at once.