Smartphone and tablet owners downloaded a record 1.76 billion iOS and Android apps during the week of Dec. 25 to Dec. 31, a mobile analytics company said Wednesday.
According to San Francisco-based Flurry, which projected total downloads using data it collected from more than 260,000 apps that use its software, the seven-day tally easily trumped the 1.2 billion iOS and Android apps downloaded during the same period in December 2011.
The 2012 one-week record was also 65% higher than the average of two "benchmark" weeks leading up to Christmas, said Flurry, and was accompanied by 50 million iOS and Android smartphone and tablet activations.
Both the holiday-week increase and activations topped what Flurry reported in 2011, when it said the Dec. 25-31 week recorded a 60% boost over benchmarks, and saw 20 million devices activated.
Last week, Peter Farago, Flurry's chief marketing officer, touted Christmas Day data, again noting new records.
Then, Flurry estimated that 328 million iOS and Android apps were downloaded on Dec. 25 alone, a 36% increase over the same day in 2011, and that 17.4 million iOS and Android devices were activated in the same 24 hour period, more than double the 6.8 million in 2011.
Looking down the road, Flurry forecast even bigger numbers for the 2013 holidays. "[We] expect the trend of one-billion-download weeks to become the norm, and that the industry will surpass the two-billion-download week during Q4," wrote Farago in a blog post.
iOS and Android app downloads during Dec. 25-31 totaled a record 1.76 billion worldwide, said analytics firm Flurry. (Image: Flurry.)
Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed. His email address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.
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