Maintaining a holiday tradition, users activated more “smart,” connected Android and iOS devices on Christmas Day 2012 than any other day of the year, reports Flurry.com’s Peter Farrago in a Dec. 27 blog post. Moreover, this Christmas Day was a record setter.
“On this Christmas Day 2012, more iPhones, iPads, Galaxys, Kindle Fires, and more, were activated than on any other day in history,” Farrago writes. “Moreover, as soon as we could tear the wrapping paper off our cool new devices, we started downloading a record volume of apps.”
Farrago proceeds to offer an overview of the number of Android and iOS devices Flurry detected worldwide this Christmas Day. Given that there are more than 260,000 mobile apps making use of Flurry Analytics, the company “detects over 90% of all new iOS and Android devices activated each day…[and] triangulates its device coverage with publicly announced figures from Google and Apple.”
Aiming to put Christmas Day 2012’s iOS and Android device numbers in broader perspective, Flurry established a baseline reference of around 4 million activations per day on average for the first 20 days of December, with a variance of “a few hundred thousand in either direction per day.”
Christmas 2012 vs Christmas 2011
“On Christmas Day, activations soared to more than 17.4 million, a 332% increase over the December baseline. By comparison, Christmas Day 2011 held the previous single-day record, having reached 6.8 million device activations. Christmas 2012 is more than 2.5 times larger than Christmas 2011, which surpassed its own baseline by more than 300%,” Farrago continues.
Doing the same for mobile app downloads, Flurry says download volumes increased 112% on Christmas compared to its calculated baseline average for the first 20 days of December. “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, besting that of any previous day in history,” Farrago comments.
Taking a finer grained approach and looking at device activations and mobile app download activity throughout Christmas Day, Flurry found a “table top” shape to the distribution, with downloads jumping early in the day to around 20 million per hour…and remaining at this level for most of the day, even after the egg nog was gone.”
