Christmas 2012 breaks Smart Device and App Download Records | Flurry Reports
Needless to say, more iOS and Android devices are activated on Christmas Day than on any other day of the year. This year was no different. This Christmas, more iPhones, iPads, Galaxy’s, Kindle Fires, etc.. were activated than on any other day in history. AND, as soon as the wrapping was out of the picture, the downloads began pouring in.
Let’s talk Numbers.
The chart below shows newly activated iOS and Android devices detected worldwide by Flurry on Christmas Day. With over 260,000 apps using Flurry Analytics, Flurry is able to detect over 90% of all new iOS and Android devices activated each day. Additionally, Flurry regularly triangulates its device coverage with publicly announced figures from Google and Apple.
To understand the magnitude of new devices activated on Christmas Day, Flurry created a baseline using the average from the first 20 days of December. During this period, daily activations averaged around 4.0 million per day, plus or minus a few hundred thousand in either direction per day. On Christmas Day, activations soared to more than 17.4 million, a 332% increase over the December average. Compared to 2011, it held the previous single-day record, having reached 6.8 million device activations. Christmas 2012 however, activations grew more 2.5 times larger than Christmas 2011, which surpassed its own baseline by more than 300%.
With a ground breaking number of iOS and Android devices flooding the market, we next look at the surge in app downloads. For these figures, Flurry estimated its percentage penetration per platform to estimate total market app downloads. The company also benchmarks download volumes tracked in its system against publicly released app download milestones from Apple and Google.
The above chart indicates that, compared to the baseline, app downloads more than doubled on Christmas. Specifically, the December 1 – 20 average, download volumes increased by 112% on Christmas. Despite the ever-growing installed base of existing smart devices, the influx of new devices on Christmas Day still helped deliver a record download day, crushing that of any previous day in history.
App Downloads by the Hour
Next up we’re looking at the downloads per hour across Christmas Day 2012. The shape of this curve looks like a table top, with downloads jumping early in the day to around 20 million per hour (when most of us were still in our pajamas) and remaining at this level for most of the day. For perspective, Flurry compares this to the average distribution of downloads per hour clocked between December 1 – 20.
Finally, Flurry drilled down into the divide between smartphones and tablets. While smartphone activations typically outpace that of tablets by 4:1, on Christmas Day 2012, more tablets were activated than smartphones. The big winners were (of course) Apple iPads, Apple iPad Minis and Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7” tablets. Amazon in particular had very strong performance in the tablet category, growing by several thousand percent over its baseline of tablet activations over the earlier part of December.
If you didn’t catch hold of this ‘Flurry’ (pun intended) of downloads then you should still be likely to catch the tail end of things for the next few weeks into the new year. Flurry anticipates downloads to surpass more than 1.5 billion, and even breaking the 2-billion download barrier.
Kevin is an Online and Mobile Marketing Strategist who has worked with companies of all sizes over the last 6 years. You can follow Kevin on any of the social platforms below.
