The App Store enjoyed a large increase of 87 percent in downloads on Christmas Day, this doesn’t really come as a surprise considering that the iPhone 5, iPad, and iPod Touch were all popular gifts.
According to Distimo App IQ’s figures for daily downloads on the Apple App Store in 2012, this year’s Christmas saw a huge increase of downloads compared to December 2012 as a whole. There was a slightly lower allover increase of about 70 percent. The most notable finding is that downloads for iPad apps in particular rose 140% and revenues rose 80%. This seems to hint that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s iPad(and iPad Mini) were the most popular gift.
Macgasm.net added that Christmas 2012 was the first holiday where tablets trumped smartphones. More tablet computers were activated than smartphones. The total number of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Android tablets activated that day was 17.4 million and 51% of those activations were tablets.
The most popular app download was Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s YouTube, Google Maps came in second, ElfYourself by OfficeMax scored third place, and Where’s My Holiday by Disney took fourth place. The latter two apps were popular downloads during Christmas. Other popular app downloads included Skype, Subway Surfers, Flow Free, Furby, Instagram, and Emoji & Unicode Icons.
The iPad and iPad Mini weren’t the only hot new tablets that were activated on Christmas day. App analytics company, Flurry, added that Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s Kindle Fire HD saw the most significant growth in a single day.
Although the actual record of how many tablets and smartphones were sold this holiday season have yet to be revealed, these numbers show that tablet computers were the must-have item on everyone’s list this year. This shouldn’t be too surprising, considering that most people already own a smartphone. Although tablet computers have successful taken off in the market, there are still many consumers who have yet to get a tablet of their own.
