Xmas week saw 1.2 billion app downloads says Flurry

Rating: High number of iOS and Android activations, too

Some amazing statistics have just emerged from Flurry Analytics in its blog here about the sheer volume of mobile app downloads and handset activations over the Xmas holiday week. Flurry prefers to refer to this period as the ‘power week’ between December 25th (Xmas Day) and December 31st 2011. Significantly, however, the week managed to punch through the billion download barrier for the first time ever and deliver 1.2 billion downloads. Flurry also provides some fascinating stats about handset activation as well. It has estimated that a record-breaking 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day alone. Furthermore, Flurry estimates that over 20 million iOS and Android devices were activated during that same power week.

The company also states the obvious – that countries where Xmas is actively celebrated recorded the biggest jumps whilst other territories – like Japan and Korea didn’t see such dramatic increases.

GoMo News particularly likes this particular stat – on Christmas day alone, some 6.8 million people switched on a new iOS/Android device.

How does Flurry arrive at these figures? Simples. Its technology is buried away in over 140,000 apps which the company says enables it to detect over 90 per cent of new iOS and Android devices.

Additionally, Flurry regularly triangulates its device and download figures with data released publicly by Google and Apple to benchmark against the market.

Xmas Day itself also holds an equally record-breaking 242 million application downloads with something like 857 million downloads recorded in the week prior to the penultimate week of 2011.

To give some idea of the size of the markets, out of that 1.2 billion during Xmas Week, almost half (509 million) made their way onto smart devices across the USA.

Second came the Chinese with 99 million and in third place was good old Blighty (the UK) with 81 million. It was nice to see that our Canadian cousins came fourth with 41 million.

Flurry blames the largely Christian based societies for the growth in downloads and activations during the power week.

GoMo News points out, however, that the three markets which punched below their weights in terms of downloads – China, South Korea and Japan are also strongholds of cdmaOne rather than GSM.

Anyway, Flurry says, “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.”