Christmas Day of 2011 saw the highest number of mobile device activations and app downloads in the year, with the New Year ‘power week’ being the more profitable than the run up to Christmas itself for applications makers. What’s more, according to the recent report by Flurry, the last week of 2011 saw the highest number of device activations and app downloads in iOS and Android history.

Apple iOS (iPhone & iPad) Max Activations in 2011 / 2012

The Flurry report’s data-set comes from over 140,000 apps running on a majority of iOS and Android devices. Flurry has an excellent application penetration allowing it to detect over 90% of new device activations each day. And, with its analytics service in over 20% of the applications downloaded from the App Store and Android Market, it can estimate the number of downloads.

And according to its recent report, a staggering 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day, with 242 million app downloads. In the week between Christmas and New Year, 20 million device activations took place, with 1.2 billion app downloads from the App Store and Android.

Max Android Activations in 2011 / 2012

In the two weeks between Dec 4 and Dec 17, there were 0.75 billion new iOS and Android app downloads, being surprisingly even. Following that there was a 60% increase in the New Year ‘power week’.

A country wise analysis by Flurry reveals the largest share of those 1.2 billion downloads was taken by the United States, with 509 million downloads (42.3%). China, the second largest app market in the world came next with 99 million downloads. The celebration of Christmas also has a significant role to play in the number of downloads.

While Christmas is celebrated in the US, there are only about 3 - 4% Christians in China. India occupied the 17th positions with 10 million downloads, which could partly be due the fact that Christmas is not a huge religious celebration in India. The top positions were all taken by Western countries including the United Kingdom, France and Canada. However, non-Christian countries such as South Korea and Japan were also in significant positions.

Flurry expects breaking the one billion download mark per week to be a common place phenomenon for 2012. A statement from the Flurry website sums up the position for the future - “While iOS and Android growth continues to amaze, the market is still by all measures relatively nascent. We look forward to continuing to chart the unprecedented adoption of mobile computing devices, usage of applications and the way in which this technology is changing consumer behaviour worldwide.”