The 2012 holiday season was a gadget-happy affair, according to new stats from mobile analytics firm Flurry.
The week between Christmas and New Year's was the largest week for new device activations and app downloads in iOS and Android history.
Analyzing more than 260,000 apps running on the majority of iOS and Android devices, Flurry concluded that approximately 17.4 million iOS and Android devices were activated and 328 million apps were downloaded on Christmas Day alone. By week's end, more than 50 million gadgets were activated and and 1.76 billion apps were downloaded, the firm estimated.
Last year, Flurry found that people downloaded 1.2 billion iOS and Android apps between Dec. 25 and Dec. 31.
Most of the download activity - 604 million or 34.4 percent - came from the U.S. "It's not surprising that the U.S. continues to lead the rest of the world, especially since the fast-closing second place China does not celebrate Christmas," Flurry marketing vice president Peter Farago said in a blog post.
As a result, Western countries where Christmas is celebrated, like Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Italy, and Mexico, topped largely non-Christian locations on app downloads, including South Korea and Japan. Still, the U.K. was far behind the U.S. with 132 million downloads.
Flurry expects that in 2013, it will become the norm to see more than 1 billion app downloads per week, perhaps even topping 2 million by the fourth quarter.
"Following a year where Google and Apple drove unprecedented adoption of mobile devices, Facebook declared itself a 'mobile' company, and Amazon and Microsoft both made significant investments into mobile computing, we look forward to continued record-breaking adoption of smart devices and applications," Farago said.
Amazon, in fact, is also celebrating incredible growth this holiday season, announcing record-breaking sales for its third-party sellers. Unit growth from its more than 2 million sellers jumped 40 percent from last year. Those sellers sold enough smartphone and tablet screen protectors to cover the field of every NFL stadium, four times over, Amazon boasted.
For more from Stephanie, follow her on Twitter @smlotPCMag.
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