14 DAY TRIAL // Analytics firm Flurry says Christmas Day sees the highest number of new device activations and app installs every year. This has been happening since Apple released the original iPhone, which Flurry appropriately designates as the beginning of the mobile revolution.
The firm thoroughly crunches numbers every Christmas to provide its invaluable analytics to developers, investors, and whomever might feel the urge to know what’s happening in the mobile sector. It does so by looking at signals coming from specific apps installed on hundreds of thousands of devices. This year it gathered data from 600,000 apps.
Most activations were Apple devices
According to the 2014 report, “Apple accounted for 51% of the new device activations worldwide Flurry recognized in the week leading up to and including Christmas Day (December 19th – 25th).”
Tracking Apple was Samsung with 18% of new device activations, while Microsoft / Nokia stood at #3 with 5.8%. Sony and LG took just one percent share (Flurry doesn’t say if that’s 1% each or 1% together). The likes of Xiaomi, Huawei, and HTC took less than one percent each, with Flurry noting that these things are popular in Asia, but December 25 isn’t celebrated there as it is in other parts of the world.
Apple activated nearly three devices for every Samsung handset powered on for the first time this holiday season. Compared to Microsoft Lumia, iPhone wins by an 8.8 margin.
Phablet market consolidates with iPhone
Despite refusing to play in this market for years, Apple’s hesitant foray into the phablet sector this year has helped raise phablet activations by a factor of 9.
Flurry says that “In the week leading up to Christmas, 13% of new device activations were phablets compared to just 4% in 2013.” It isn’t stated just how much the iPhone 6 Plus accounted for exactly, but Flurry says it was one of the top 5 devices activated for Christmas. No need to do the math to conclude that it mattered.