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It was a Merry Christmas indeed for Apple and Google: activations of iOS and Android devices reached a record high this year, with more devices activated on Christmas day than on any other day of the year, reports analytics firm Flurry.
Flurry said device activations climbed higher from their daily December average of 4 million to 17.4 million on Christmas Day, a staggering 332 percent increase. Most of the users who activated their devices on Christmas day predictably spent the rest of it downloading apps for their new smart devices.
Tablet activations overtook smartphone activations this Christmas
Christmas 2011 saw only 6.8 million devices activated on Christmas last year, which was the previous single-day record holder. This year, tablets overtook phone activations, even as Apple tablets dominated on Christmas. The 7-inch Kindle Fire HD made a strong show this year too. 51 percent of smart devices activated this year were tablets as compared to 20 percent last year.
With a new phone come new apps. The surge in the app downloads too was higher on Christmas than the rest of the month. The jump was almost 112 percent compared to the rest of the days in December.
Flurry also studied app downloads per hour: reportedly, downloads jumped “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, even after the egg nog was gone.”
Compared to last Christmas, when the downloads hovered somewhere just above 10 million per hour, this points at the huge role of smartphones and tablets as gifts on occasions such as Christmas.
Flurry analytics software is said to detect 90 percent of all new iOS and Android activations thanks to its presence in more than 260,000 apps.
Meanwhile, smartphone sales have been soaring in India too. Samsung recently revealed that 10 million Samsung Galaxy devices have been sold in the country since the very first Samsung Galaxy device, the Galaxy S, reached our shores in June 2010. Samsung VP (Mobile) Asim Warsi said, “Innovative devices like the Samsung Galaxy S, Galaxy SII and SIII, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note 2 and Galaxy Y have caught the imagination of customers and helped us democratise the smartphone experience in the Indian market. This has helped Samsung sell more than 10 million Galaxy devices in the Indian market since June 2010, when the first Galaxy device was launched.”
While Samsung refused to divulge which individual handsets contributed to these spectacular figures, the Galaxy Y series, the two Note phablets and the Galaxy S III are said to have contributed to about 50 percent of the sales. Warsi added, “Through our series of consistent Smartphone launches, Samsung has fuelled the growth of the smartphone market in India and has been a category leader since last year. Samsung’s portfolio of 13 Galaxy devices in the Indian market are priced between Rs 6,790 to Rs 39,990."
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