The final week of 2011 not only wrapped up a mediocre year for technology, but also ushered in a record smashing number of mobile application downloads. Over the holiday week (December 25 – December 31) more than 1.2 billion iOS and Android applications were download according to a new study from Flurry:
For background, the third full Sunday-to-Saturday week, not shown in the chart, December 18 – 24, is elevated slightly due primarily to December 24 downloads. Up until the final week of the year, this penultimate week set the download record with 857 million downloads. The final week of the year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, grew by 60% over the early-December baseline, historically punching through the billion download barrier for the first time ever to deliver 1.2 billion downloads.
It’s the first time that mobile applications broke the billion download mark in a week according to Flurry. If this isn’t an indicator about where mobile computing is heading compared to traditional desktop computing, we don’t know what is. It certainly looks like 2011 was the year that mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone took priority under the Christmas tree. The rate of download is also a nice little indicator of how important application stores are for consumers. It’s never been easier to find useful applications from the moment that a device boots. The days of heading to the web and Googling for software titles is quickly becoming a thing of the past.
For more analysis, check out Holiday 2011: Breaking the One Billion App Download Barrier on the Flurry Blog.