The most important week of the year for app makers is the final week of the year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Starting with Christmas Day, the largest single device activation day of the year, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is marked by significantly elevated device activations and app downloads. This is the primary reason why companies jockey to rank well leading up to Christmas Day itself. This report reveals that the last week of 2012 was the largest week for both new device activations and app downloads in iOS and Android history.
For this report, Flurry leverages its data-set from over 260,000 apps running on the significant majority of iOS and Android devices. With its application penetration, Flurry can detect over 90% of all new devices activated each day. Additionally, with its analytics service in more than 25% of all applications downloaded on a given day from the App Store and Google Play, Flurry can reliably estimate total iOS and Android downloads. To benchmark against the market, Flurry regularly triangulates its device and download figures with data released publicly by Google and Apple.
In its most recent report, Flurry estimated that a record-breaking 17.4 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day, along with an equally record-breaking 328 million application downloads. Studying the data from December 25 – December 31, additional records were set, now for the highest number of device activations and app downloads of any week in history. Over the holiday week, Flurry estimates that over 50 million iOS and Android devices were activated, and 1.76 billion applications were downloaded. Let’s take a closer look at downloads.
The columns in the chart compare the number of app downloads during Christmas through New Year’s Day (on the right) versus the average of the first two equivalent weeks of December (on the left). The seven days from December 25 – December 31 spanned from a Tuesday to a Monday. As such, we take the average of the first Tuesday-to-Monday weeks in December to establish a baseline. The average downloads over these weeks were surprisingly even. The final week of the year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, grew by 65% over the early-December baseline, historically breaking through the largest single week record previously set during the same week of 2011. While several weeks since late November delivered billion+ week download levels, the holiday week delivered a record-shattering 1.7 billion downloads.
This second chart shows the top twenty countries across which the record 1.76 billion downloads were distributed. Starting from the left, the U.S. took the lion’s share with 604 million downloads, or 34.3%. Referencing an earlier report, wherein Flurry sized the installed base of top countries, it’s not surprising that the U.S. continues to lead the rest of the world, especially since the fast-closing second place China does not celebrate Christmas (only 3% of China’s population is Christian). Just before the holidays, Flurry estimated that there were 181 million active iOS and Android devices in the U.S. market, compared to 167 million in China.
Following the trend that Western countries more widely celebrate Christmas – note the higher positions of countries like Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Italy and Mexico in the chart – these countries over-indexed against largely non-Christian countries of China, South Korea and Japan. For example, while Japan and South Korea have the 4th and 5th largest smart device installed bases of all countries, they ranked 14th and 10th, respectively, for downloads over the record week. Christmas is not recognized as a national holiday in Japan, and in South Korea, roughly half the population self-identifies as non-religious. Countries that significantly over-indexed during the holiday include Russia, Italy and Mexico which drove the top 7th, 8th and 9th most downloads despite the fact that their installed bases are ranked 13th, 14th and 15th, respectively.
Looking forward to 2013, Flurry expects the trend of one-billion-download weeks to become the norm, and that the industry will surpass the two-billion download week during Q4. Following a year where Google and Apple drove unprecedented adoption of mobile devices, Facebook declared itself a “mobile” company, and Amazon and Microsoft both made significant investments into mobile computing, we look forward to continued record-breaking adoption of smart devices and applications. Happy New Year from everyone at Flurry.