• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, January 2, 2013

Solidifying 2012 as the year of the app, a record 1.76 billion applications were downloaded during the last week of the year, according to new global estimates from mobile analytics firm Flurry.
 
Because gadgets have become such a popular gift, the end of the year -- and Christmas Day in particular -- have become prime time for app adoption.
 
“Starting with Christmas Day, the largest single device activation day of the year, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is marked by significantly elevated device activations and app downloads,” according to Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry.
 
On Christmas Day alone, 17.4 million iOS and Android devices were activated, while consumers downloaded some 328 million apps, by Flurry’s estimate.
 
Studying the data from Dec. 25-31, additional records were set, including the highest number of device activations and app downloads of any week in history. Over the holiday week, Flurry estimates that over 50 million iOS and Android devices were activated.
 
Of the roughly 1.7 billion app downloads during the last week of the year, U.S. consumers were responsible for about 604 million of them, or 34.3%.
 
Just before the holidays, Flurry estimated there were 181 million active iOS and Android devices in the U.S. market, compared to 167 million in China. Flurry acknowledges that China shouldn’t be expected to experience a comparable Christmas Day-bump because the vast majority of Chinese citizens don’t celebrate the holiday.
 
Looking ahead, Flurry expects the trend of 1 billion-download weeks to become commonplace in 2013, and the industry to experience 2 billion downloads in a single week sometime in the fourth quarter of the year.