A Gift to Developers: A Quarter of a Billion Apps Downloaded on Christmas

A record-number of new devices activated on Christmas morning is leading to a tidal wave of new mobile application downloads.

Apple’s App Store is on pace to exceed 10 billion downloads this year alone, which is twice the number it recorded over the three previous years combined.

The Android Market is also setting records. Over the past seven months, it has achieved more than 7 billion downloads, which more than triples its life-to-date downloads of 3 billion reached in May 2011.

At those rates, both operating systems are generating roughly one billion downloads a month, or the equivalent of 33 million a day.

The data was reported by Flurry Analytics, which creates tools that thousands of developers use to track usage of their mobile applications.

Christmas Day was one of the big catalysts for achieving huge end-of-the-year records.

Flurry found that application downloads more than doubled on Christmas compared to the average number of downloads occurring during the first 20 days of December.

On Dec. 25, it registered 242 million app downloads, jumping more than 125 percent over an average day.

In addition, because of its insight into application usage, Flurry is also able to see the number of new devices activated. Phones and tablets are always a hot Christmas item and this year was no exception.

On the average day in December, 1.5 million phones were activated, but on Christmas, 6.8 million were activated, representing a 353 percent spike. Last year, Christmas held the previous single-day record with 2.8 million device activations.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

First the NSA came for, well, jeez pretty much everybody’s data at this point, and I said nothing because wait how does this joke work

— Parker Higgins via Twitter