Record iOS, Android app downloads tallied in last week of 2012
According to new data from research firm Flurry Analytics, 1.76 billion apps were downloaded during the last week of the year.
The last week of 2012 saw a significant surge in the number of apps downloaded by iOS and Android users, according to new data from research firm Flurry Analytics.
From December 25 through December 31, 1.76 billion applications were downloaded by iOS and Android users, up 65 percent compared with the weekly average of 1.07 billion between December 4 and December 17. On Christmas Day alone, 328 million applications were downloaded across iOS and Android.
Flurry's data was taken from analysis it performed on more than 260,000 applications available on iOS and Android. The company claims to be able to detect 90 percent of all new devices activated each day, and its analytics service for developers is running on more than one-quarter of the programs downloaded daily on Apple's App Store and the Google Play marketplace. All of that data is then compared to publicly available figures released by Apple and Google to maximize reliability.
Flurry used its data to evaluate downloads by country, and found that 604 million of the apps were downloaded in the U.S. last week, followed by China with 183 million downloads. The U.K. tallied 132 million downloads.
Moving to hardware, Flurry found that it was a similarly strong end to the year for Apple and Android vendors. On Christmas Day alone, 17.4 million iOS and Android devices were activated, Flurry estimates. More than 50 million iOS and Android devices were activated during the last week of 2012.
Looking ahead, Flurry estimates that more than 1 billion apps will be downloaded on a weekly basis until some point in the fourth quarter, when iOS and Android app downloads will combine to hit 2 billion each week.