All of those new handhelds that were gifted in December led to a spike in mobile app downloads that set a record of one billion downloads the following week. The week of Christmas provided the world’s first billion-downloads per week, with 1.2 billion apps being ported to Android and iOS devices.
The seven days from Sunday, Dec. 25 through Saturday, Dec. 31, saw a 60 percent jump in the average number of downloads from the first two full weeks of the month. The final week also handily beat the previous week’s record of 857 million to zoom past that 1 billion download mark for the first time.
This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, since Flurry reported last week that almost seven million Android and iOS devices were activated on Christmas Day alone and 20 million activated within the week. This season of gift giving is massively correlated with the season of peak app downloads.
The week’s numbers capped off a Christmas Day record of 242 million apps downloaded and 6.8 million activated for both mobile platforms within a 24-hour period.
The United States was far and away the biggest country of all in Flurry’s research when it came to app downloads for the week. The country accounted for 509 million or 42.3 percent, of all downloads. The next biggest country was China at 99 million. Considering that China accounts for one-third of the world’s smartphone market, and the U.S. for 41 percent, that’s a somewhat disproportionate breakdown.
Flurry explains, saying, “While the United States widely celebrates Christmas, and 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.” One other possibility is that China has a lot of popular Android app stores that operate outside the official Android market; downloads in those states are less easy to track and can’t be tracked by Flurry.
The Christmas holidays clearly played a huge role in the record app downloads across the country. Behind China, the U.K., Canada, Germany, France, and other Western countries pulled in a hefty percentage of last week’s major download spike.
Flurry looked at more than 144,000 apps running on a majority of iOS and Android devices and coordinates its own numbers with those publicly released by Apple and Google.
Edited by
Tammy Wolf
