Apple Wins Christmas with Device Activations

The introduction of a slew of new devices helped Apple to have a very, very merry Christmas this year, if sales are anything to go by. The tech giant was number one in device activations this holiday season, leaving competitors like Samsung, Nokia, Sony and LG with coal in their stockings.
The good news for Apple comes thanks to Flurry Analytics, an app data  analytics  firm, which found that Apple accounted for more than 51 percent of all device activations worldwide for the week of December 19 to December 25. The firm tracks data from more than 600,000 apps to see which ones consumers are downloading the most.
Samsung a Distant Second

“It’s clear that Santa is no longer into cookies -- he prefers Apples,” the firm said in a blog post announcing its findings. Apple was the winner by a long shot this year, with its closest rival, Samsung, coming in a distant second with 17.7 percent of all device activations.
Nokia handsets, the business  unit that was acquired by Microsoft earlier this year, rounded out the top three, with just 5.8 percent of activations. Sony and LG came in fourth and fifth place with 1.6 percent and 1.4 percent of the market, respectively.
New entrants in the handset market such as Xiaomi, Huawei, and HTC all had less than one percent share on Christmas day. One reason for their relatively weak showing may be due to their popularity in Asian markets, where December 25 is not the biggest gift-giving day of the year.
Medium-Size Devices Rule
Nevertheless, the story of the season is Apple. For every Samsung device that was activated, 2.9 Apple devices were activated. While, the holidays in general and Christmas in particular are not the sole indicators of smartphone market share and trends, it is safe to say that the newly released iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have helped the company have a blockbuster holiday season, despite a lackluster holiday season for the consumer electronics industry as a whole.
Meanwhile, the app sector once again experienced a large number of installs on Christmas day, just as it has in previous years. Flurry reported that it tracked two and a half times the number of app installs as compared to an average day in the first three weeks of December.
That amount of activity is somewhat surprising in a market as mature and crowded as the U.S. app sector. Among the apps that were downloaded, messaging and gaming apps proved to be the most popular installs on Christmas day.
But despite the overall positive trends for devices, some form factors did better than others. The number of tablets as a percentage of the total device market fell from 2012. Full-size tablets went from 16 percent of the device market in 2012 to 11 percent this Christmas, while small tablets went from 17 percent to 11 percent this year. Phablets were the big winners, climbing from just 3 percent of the market in 2012 to 13 percent this year.
Medium-size phones, meanwhile, continue to represent the vast majority of the device market with 64 percent of activations, up from 58 percent in 2012. Small phones continued their decline, making up just 2 percent of activations, down from 7 percent two years ago.