Mobile Device Activations Skyrocket on Christmas Day

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