The final week of 2012 was a record-breaking seven days for the mobile industry, according to a report Wednesday from Flurry Analytics. During that time, 1.76 billion mobile apps were downloaded to iOS and Android platforms and more than 50 million iOS and Android devices were activated, including over 17.4 million on Christmas Day alone.
The final week’s numbers represent a 65 percent increase over the average numbers for the first half of December, and smashed last year’s app download total for the final week by over 500 million downloads.
The 1.76 billion downloads represent worldwide totals, and among the nations splitting that total, the U.S. led by a wide margin with 604 million downloads. The next highest totals came from China, at 183 million, and the U.K., with 132 million. Other nations, mostly European, comprise the majority of the remaining list with downloads between approximately 20 and 60 million.
Flurry’s report notes that some countries on the list have disproportionally high download totals compared to their overall mobile install base. This is due to nations with large Christian populations, such as Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Italy, and Mexico, in which Christmas celebrations and gift giving explain the larger numbers. This is compared to China, which has nearly as many mobile devices as the U.S., but does not celebrate Christmas.
Although the numbers reported by Flurry are impressive, perhaps even more impressive is the fact that, even in the first two weeks of December, app downloads averaged more than one billion per week. Flurry expects this trend to continue, and notes that the industry is on track for regular two-billion-download weeks by the fourth quarter of the year.
Flurry monitors the downloads and usage of over 260,000 apps in both the iOS App Store and Google Play Android Store. The firm uses its own accumulated data along with figures released by Apple and Google to determine usage statistics, and claims that via this methodology it can detect over 90% of device activations and 25% of all application downloads each day.
The report provides interesting data for the top two mobile app platforms, Android and iOS, but does not measure smaller platforms such as Windows Phone and Blackberry.
Teaser graphic made with help from Shutterstock.
[via ArsTechnica]