It’s been a wild year for iOS, Android, and the entire smartphone and tablet market as a whole. There’s nothing like ending the year with a bang than with the holiday shopping season, when nowadays it seems like all anyone ever gets anymore is a smartphone or tablet. If there’s anything to back up that statement, it’s the statistics recently published by Flurry Analytics which has the number of iOS and Android device activations on Christmas Day 2012 at around 17.4 million.
17.4 million devices activated on a single day. Last year, activations for both platforms totaled just 7 million and we thought that was a lot. To further put this into perspective, Flurry says that the average number of activations per day from December 1st to December 20th was 4 million. The jump to 17.4 million on Christmas Day is a 332 percent increase.
Since typically in direct correlation with the number of devices sold, iOS and Android app downloads rose on Christmas Day as well. Averaging 155 million per day from December 1st to December 20th, the Christmas Day average was a 112 percent increase to 328 million.
Aside from the overall spike to 17.4 million activations on Christmas Day, the tidbit I found the most interesting about this report was that among all the devices activated, 51 percent were tablets while 49 percent were smartphones. Smartphone sales on average per day in December outsold tablets 4 to 1. The most likely reason is becoming smartphones are becoming more of a necessity in people’s lives and therefore purchased year-round, while tablets remain a fun gift to give that consumers often want more than they need.
As a disclaimer, these numbers come from Flurry Analytics rather than Google or Apple themselves and are estimates based on the data Flurry gathers, albeit they are reputable ones.