There were a lot of mobile devices under the tree this year, as evidenced by a new stat from Flurry Analytics: more than 50 million new iOS and Android activations over Christmas week.
Flurry, which keeps tabs on 260,000 apps and claims it can detect 90% of new daily activations on smartphones and tablets, also reported that consumers downloaded 1.76 billion apps during the period of Dec. 25-Dec. 31. As the chart below shows, that's a big jump over the comparable week in 2011.
To put the activations figure in perspective, Flurry estimated in August that there were 640 million iOS and Android devices in use.
The researcher had previously estimated that app downloads hit 328 million on Christmas Day while Android/iOS activations reached 17.4 million. As expected, the U.S. led the world in downloads with 604 million, or 34.3% of the world's total. China was a distant second with 183 million. As Flurry notes, though, only 3% of China's population is Christian, so Christmas isn't a big deal there.
