Mobile Device Activations Skyrocket on Christmas Day

Source: Thinkstock

Worldwide, some 17.4 million mobile devices were activated on Christmas Day this year according to research firm Flurry. That’s more than four times the 4 million average number of devices activated between December 1st and December 20th. The company claims that it captures more than 90% of all new activations every day based on 260,000 apps using Flurry Analytics.

New mobile devices using the iOS operating system from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Android from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) also downloaded a total of 328 million apps on Christmas Day, more than double the daily average for earlier in the month of 155 million app downloads per day.
A particularly interesting bit of Flurry’s report indicates that for the first 20 days of December, 80% of mobile devices activated were smartphones, with the other 20% coming from tablet activations. On Christmas Day, 49% of device activations were smartphones and 51% were tablet activations. The iPad and iPad Mini, along with the Kindle Fire HD 7-inch tablet from Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) were the big winners. Without providing the data, Flurry says that “Amazon had a very strong performance in the tablet category, growing by several thousand percent over its baseline of tablet activations over the earlier part of December.” Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets use a proprietary version of Android.

Taken together with earlier research from Flurry that shows tablet use outpacing smartphone use for entertainment-related functions, Christmas Day activations further emphasize the point that tablets can make a serious claim to being the hot sector for the coming few years.

Paul Ausick