Christmas Day marks a great time for both Apple and its developers as waves of people are gifted iOS devices and enter into the download ecosystem for the first time. This accounts for a great increase in Christmas Day app downloads, which this year was 87 percent higher than the December average. While at a glance this may seem like a sizeable jump in downloads, Christmas of 2011 marked a massive increase of 230 percent over the monthly download average.
While overall downloads only increased by 87 percent, the iPad still shows significant signs of growth as iPad downloads managed to increase by 140 percent. Tablets are clearly hitting their stride when it comes to popularity, as this Christmas marked the first time that more tablets were activated than smartphones. Of the total 17.4 million Android and iOS devices activated on Christmas, tablets accounted for 51 percent of all device activations compared to 49 percent for smartphone activations.
Even though the spike for iOS downloads wasn’t as impressive this Christmas as it was in 2011, Christmas Day still managed to be the busiest day for app downloads of all time. A combined 328 million apps were downloaded by users around the world.
If you were thinking of diving into the wild and wacky world of app development, now might be a good time to start.