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Americans Went Wild on Christmas Day: 17.4 Million Device Activations on Android and iOS
Sites include Apple.com 
, flurry.com , Google.com . Published on January 4th, 2013. Written by Anthony West.
Call it a post-election treat, but people in America went absolutely nuts with their spending this holiday season and invariably they were buying mobile devices. 
The full extent of the spending spree comes to us courtesy of Flurry Analytics and according to the site; Christmas 2012 saw the most widespread activations of mobile devices in the history of time. Christmas Day 2011 saw a hefty chunk of activations for sure, but this year, those numbers were eclipsed to the tune of 2.5 times.
Flurry’s calculations
The analytics platform has around 260,000 apps which it uses to track the pulse of device activations. Using the data pulled from this army of applications, Flurry was able to determine the rate of device activations across all OS platforms. The data showed that more than 17.4 million devices were activated—a whopping 332% increase over the baseline set of activations. Last year device activations clocked in at only 6.8 million.
Flurry’s data also showed some interesting numbers across the platforms and especially regarding device activations in the days leading up to Christmas. Between December 1 – 20 for instance, Flurry estimates that of the entire set of mobile device activations, only 20% were tablets; the remaining 80% were smartphones. Contrast this with activity on Christmas Day itself where a staggering 51% of the mobile device activations were tablets. Clearly this stat shows what sells more at Christmas and unsurprisingly, Apple chose to unveil its iPad mini in the run-up to Christmas.
Winners and losers
The record number of activations means that some mobile device makers struck Christmas gold while others may not have feared so well. According to Flurry’s data, the big winners were Apple and Amazon. The former of course saw decent sales of its Apple iPad mini and iPad offering whilst the latter recorded massive sales of the Kindle Fire HD 7” tablets. Of the two Amazon recorded the biggest gains in terms of sales and this has helped the retailer to add handsomely to its bottom line this year.
On the losing side—though not so much, has to be Google who with its Nexus 7 tablet didn’t manage to create quite the splash that Apple and Amazon did. Samsung also failed to sell a lot of tablets though its android-powered line of smartphones were massive sellers.
App makers also struck gold
New device activations mean app downloads and Flurry’s data showed also that developers had a bit of feast on the Christmas Day activity. Developers like Rovio (Angry Birds) and others are usually first in line in terms of app downloads by new users, and so these players would have benefited nicely from the surge in sale of mobile devices.
Retailers will also benefit, though not before the next surge of online sales. Come January, online retailers who are well poised to handle the surge in online mobile spending will have another 17.4 million shoppers to cater to. All in all device makers and connected parties can count December 2012 as bumper day for all things mobile.
Did you get a tablet this Christmas? Share your joy with us below using the comments.
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