A report by Flurry Analytics reveals that Apple dominated this year's Christmas, with more than half of the mobile devices that were activated on the days leading to Christmas being iDevices.
Flurry has been studying the activations of new devices for Christmas, as this signifies the gifts that people give and receive for the holiday. The report aims to understand the kinds of devices that are popular with consumers for Christmas, along with the apps that the users are filling their devices with once they get them.
This year's Christmas continued the annual trend of seeing the most number of activations of new devices and installation of apps for the entire year.
To piece together the report on what devices were given and what apps were installed, Flurry extracted data from over 600,000 apps that the analytics company tracks.
The data revealed that 51.3 percent of the new devices activated on the week leading up to and including Christmas were Apple devices. Samsung took second place with 17.7 percent of the new devices, and Nokia claimed the third spot at 5.8 percent for activations of mostly new Lumia devices.
After the top three, the rest of the manufacturers in the device market become very fragmented, with Sony at 1.6 percent and LG at 1.4 percent, the only other devices that gained more than a percentage of the market share for new devices. Rising Asian brands Xiaomi, Huawei and HTC all only had less than a percentage of the market share, primarily due to the fact that Christmas is not the largest gift-giving occasion in the year for most Asian countries.
Upon receiving new devices, one of the first instincts of users is to download and install a trove of apps into the device. For the United States, Flurry found that the number of app installations on Christmas is 2.5 times higher compared to the average of daily app installations throughout the first weeks of the month. It is of no surprise that of these new app installations, apps for games and messaging received the biggest increase compared to the previous days.
In terms of the form factors of the devices being activated, Flurry found that there was a massive increase in phablets being activated, from 4 percent last year to 13 percent this year, spurred by the popularity of the iPhone 6 Plus which was one of the devices in the top 5 for this year's Christmas. The rise of the phablets was at the expense of full-sized tablets, as percentage for the form factor decreased by 6 percent to 11 percent.
The medium-sized phone, however, is still the most popular form factor with 64 percent of the activations, highlighted by the top device being activated which is the iPhone 6.
