Did you behave well enough throughout the year to avoid finding a lump of coal in your stocking? Instead of finding a small black combustible rock, were you lucky enough to score a shiny new mobile device?
Going by data from Flurry Analytics, a lot of you are probably nodding and grinning as you read this. Flurry claims to accurately detect "roughly 100%" of all new Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iOS and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android device activations each day. The researcher also regularly checks its figures with the digits that Apple and Google publicly release.
Flurry's figures show that between Dec. 1 and Dec. 20, an average of 1.5 million iPhones, iPads, Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) Kindle Fires, Samsung Galaxy S IIs, and other smartphones and tablets were activated each day. Activations were fairly steady, ranging between 1.3 million and 1.8 million each day throughout the "baseline" period.
Source: Flurry.com.
Christmas Day saw a massive 6.8 million device activations, representing a 353% jump compared with the average 1.5 million figure. That number also more than doubles the previous single-day record set last Christmas, when 2.8 million happy gift receivers breathed life into their shiny new gadgets.
What's the first thing a new iPhone owner is likely to do? Load up his or her new companion with the latest apps, of course. Flurry says new iOS and Android app downloads on Dec. 25 soared by 125%, using a similar methodology. The day saw 242 million new app downloads, compared with the 108 million average baseline.
Seeing nearly a quarter-billion downloads is more than double any other day in the history of both dominant mobile platforms, save for Christmas Eve. Through New Year's Day, Flurry is expecting to see about 1 billion total downloads.
For the full year, Flurry notes that Apple's App Store is set to break 10 billion downloads, more than double the cumulative downloads over the past three years combined. The researcher also expects similar performance from the Android Market, which hit 3 billion lifetime downloads in May this year and promptly more than tripled that figure to 10 billion by this month.
That should be music to the ears of many an app developer, especially mobile-game makers like Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: EA), Activision Blizzard (Nasdaq: ATVI), and Glu Mobile (Nasdaq: GLUU).
Don't act surprised; we knew this was coming. Still need proof that the mobile revolution is going to be huge? I don't.
With iOS and Android leading the mobile revolution, some winners are hard to see -- because they're buried inside the gadgets. The proliferation of mobile gadgets is going to be breathtaking, and a handful of companies stand to rake in the profits as consumers snap up each year's latest and greatest models. We've just released a new special free report on 3 Hidden Winners of the iPhone, iPad, and Android Revolution. In it, you'll find three companies that supply crucial components that virtually every mobile device relies on. Check it out now -- it's free.
