It appears that quite a few people asked Santa Claus for a new Apple iPhone or iPad this Christmas. And if the latest Flurry Analytics numbers are any indication, Santa heard them and delivered. The market research firm found that Apple accounted for over 51% of new device activations worldwide between December 19th and 25th. Its closest competition, Samsung, could only muster 17.7% of all Christmas 2014 device activations. In a surprising third place was Nokia with a further 5.8%.
To put this in perspective, for every Samsung devices that was activated, Apple activated 2.9 devices. For every Microsoft Lumia device activated, Apple activated 8.8 devices.
It should come as no surprise with such domination that the Apple iPhone 6 was the most activated device. The iPhone 6 Plus was also among the top five. Smartphones with larger screens (better known as phablets) accounted for 13% of all activations, up sharply from only 4% in 2013. As we have seen from other numbers, these gains came at the expense primarily of smaller sized tablets.
Apple’s domination and the absence of some brands may be explained by the fact that December 25th is not the biggest gift-giving day of the year in many Asian markets where other brands, such as Xiaomi, may be stronger.
As we have seen in past years, Christmas day may soon have to be renamed App Install day. Americans installed 2.5 times as many apps on Christmas day as on an average day in the first three weeks of December. Games and messaging apps once again dominated.
Flurry tracks some 600,000 apps to draw its conclusions.
Source : Flurry Analytics