The holiday season, between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, sees more mobile device activations than any other period during the year. Leveraging their data-set from over 140,000 apps, Flurry believes that iOS and Android phones set new records over the holidays.
“Flurry estimated that a record-breaking 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day, along with an equally record-breaking 242 million application downloads,” wrote Peter Farago. “Studying the data from December 25 — December 31, additional records were set, now for the highest number of device activations and app downloads of any week in history. Over the holiday ‘power week,’ Flurry estimates that over 20 million iOS and Android devices were activated, and 1.2 billion applications were downloaded.”
“This second chart shows the top twenty countries across which the record 1.2 billion downloads were distributed,” he continued. “Starting from the left, the U.S. took the lion’s share with 509 million downloads, or 42.3 percent. Referencing an earlier report, wherein Flurry sized the current installed base and market upside for each country, it’s not surprising that the U.S. continues to lead the rest of the world by such a large margin. We estimate that just prior to the holidays, there were 109 million active iOS and Android devices in the U.S. market. Compared to the worldwide total active installed base of 246 million, this was 41 percent. China, the world’s second largest app market, which has roughly one-third of the U.S. installed base saw only one-fifth of the relative downloads. It’s important to note that the celebration of Christmas as a holiday impacted download performance. While the United States widely celebrates Christmas, China is largely non-religious, with over 60 percent of the population considering themselves agnostic or atheist. In China, Christians make up just 3 — 4 percent of the population.”
“Looking forward to 2012, Flurry expects breaking the one-billion-download-barrier per week will become more common-place. While iOS and Android growth continues to amaze, the market is still by all measures relatively nascent. We look forward to continuing to chart the unprecedented adoption of mobile computing devices, usage of applications and the way in which this technology is changing consumer behavior worldwide,” Farago concluded.
Source: Flurry.com
