It was a banner holiday for smartphone makers in 2011, with records snapping all over the place. The Christmas weekend saw the most smartphone activations ever on a single day in the U.S., and it also saw more app downloads worldwide in a single week than ever before.
The numbers come from Flurry Analytics, as reported by TechCrunch. Flurry estimates that across both Apple’s iOS platform and Google’s Android mobile operating system, users accounted for 1.2 billion downloads during the week Dec. 25-31. It’s a jump of about 60 percent above normal, Flurry says. A normal week sees about 750,000 app downloads across both platforms.
It’s a banner week for the mobile app market in general, as Christmas 2011 marks the first time app downloads have broken 1 billion in a single week. Add that to the earlier Christmas record that Flurry reported, when smartphone activations neared 7 million on Christmas alone. Obviously, with all those new users on their respective platforms, a whole ton of downloads for the next five days makes a lot of sense, and was something Flurry expected to see.
The numbers are broken down even further. Almost a quarter of the 1.2 billion estimated app downloads, 242 million, occurred on Christmas Day. The U.S. led app downloads over the holiday with 509 million – just less than half – with China coming in second with 99 million downloads. The UK was third with 81 million, followed by Canada, Germany and France, all hovering right around 40 million downloads to round out the top five.
While a billion app downloads in a single week is notable right now, Flurry thinks that 2012 will see multiple billion-download weeks. App consumption has been on a significant rise since the rise of the smartphone. Apple’s iTunes App Store almost hit 10 billion downloads for the year in 2011, nearly twice the downloads it had clocked over the three previous years, as All Things D points out. Android also had a big year, logging 7 billion downloads for the year in the Android Market.
With smartphone expanding in emerging markets as well as domestic ones, there are more iPhones in users’ hands than ever before, and the number is only climbing. Expect the number of apps downloaded and the number of apps available to download to keep climbing right along with it.
