242m Apps Downloaded on Christmas Day, says Flurry

As smartphones filled stockings across the world, Christmas Day saw a total of 242m app downloads, according to a report from Flurry. Weekly downloads also passed 1bn for the first time, with 1.2bn apps being downloaded across the holiday week of 25-31 December.

Handset activation remained steady over the first 20 days of December, averaging 1.5m per day, before jumping 353 per cent on Christmas Day to more than 6.8m. Compared to Christmas Day 2010, holding the previous record at 2.8m device activations, Christmas 2011 grew by more than 140 per cent.

With more than 140,000 apps using Flurry Analytics, the company can detect roughly 100 per cent of all new iOS and Android devices activated each day, triangulated with figures from Google and Apple.