BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Apple iOS and Google Android Enjoy An Appy New Year

This article is more than 10 years old.

Consumers were ringing in the new year on mobile devices like iPhone 4S and playing more mobile games than ever before. Records were set during the final week of 2011 with more Apple iOS and Google Android device activations than any other week of the year. Christmas Day kicked off the record-setting week with 6.8 million device activations and 242 million application downloads. Newbies to smartphones and tablets spent the holidays activating devices and downloading new videogames and apps, according to a new report from Flurry. Over this one week, Flurry estimates that over 20 million iOS and Android devices were activated and 1.2 billion applications were downloaded.

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 Sunday to a Saturday.   As such, we take the average of the first two full Sunday-to-Saturday weeks in December to establish a baseline.   The average downloads over these weeks are surprisingly even.  For background, the third full Sunday-to-Saturday week, not shown in the chart, December 18 – 24, is elevated slightly due primarily to December 24 downloads.  Up until the final week of the year, this penultimate week set the download record with 857 million downloads.   The final week of the year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, grew by 60% over the early-December baseline, historically punching through the billion download barrier for the first time ever to deliver 1.2 billion downloads.

This second chart shows the top twenty countries across which the record 1.2 billion downloads were distributed.  Starting from the left, the U.S. took the lion’s share with 509 million downloads, or 42.3%.  Referencing an earlier report, wherein Flurry sized the current installed base and market upside for each country, it’s not surprising that the U.S. continues to lead the rest of the world by such a large margin.  We estimate that just prior to the holidays, there were 109 million active iOS and Android devices in the U.S. market.  Compared to the worldwide total active installed base of 246 million, this was 41%.  China, the world’s second largest app market, which has roughly one-third of the U.S. installed base saw only one-fifth of the relative downloads.  It’s important to note that the celebration of Christmas as a holiday impacted download performance.  While the United States widely celebrates Christmas,  China is largely non-religious, with over 60% of the population considering themselves agnostic or atheist.  In China, Christians make up just 3 – 4% of the population.

Following the trend that Western countries more widely celebrate Christmas – note the higher positions of countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Italy, Spain and Mexico in the chart – these countries over-indexed against largely non-Christian countries of China, South Korea and Japan.    For example, South Korea and Japan have the 4th and 5th largest smart device installed bases of all countries, yet they ranked 7th 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.  As a point of interest, Canada appears to have over-indexed the most, using its 8th largest installed base to drive the 4th most downloads over the holiday period.

Looking forward to 2012, Flurry expects breaking the one-billion-download-barrier per week will become a common occurrence. There will be plenty of new devices announced at CES 2012 and Mobile World Congress 2012 to add fire to these already hot flames.

Flurry is able to get a crystal clear picture of the Android and iOS markets through its data set from over 140,000 apps that run on those predominant platforms. With its application penetration, Flurry can detect over 90% of all new devices activated each day.  Additionally, with its analytics service in more than 20% of all applications downloaded on a given day from the App Store and Android Market, Flurry can reliably estimate total iOS and Android downloads.