Christmas
day is a big day for new mobile devices—the perfect gift for ignoring your family during the holidays. Based on about 780,000 apps, Flurry tracks new device activations and app downloads on
Christmas day when many receive their presents.
Over the past three years, smartphones with larger screens—some in the media refert to them as “phablets”
(phone/tablets)—have caught on as a trend, increasing in new activations to 27%.
The larger screen sizes have also facilitated the recent demand for better video streaming services on
mobile.
As the phablet trend continues, marketers will most likely see a correlative demand for more inventory to fit the larger screen sizes of the devices.
In 2013, it appeared that
the larger smartphones were taking share from tablets, but more recently, the tablets’ market share has leveled off, and more consumers are purchasing larger phones rather than tablets.
Samsung’s Galaxy Note was the first successful smartphone with a larger screen size, which Apple copied soon after, releasing the iPhone 6.
According to Flurry, Apple currently
dominates the holiday device shopping battle with 49.1% of all new devices (down from 51.3% last year).
Samsung took 19.8%, up from 17.7% last year with its new offerings of the Galaxy Grand
Prime, Core Prime and S6.
Christmas day saw 2.2 times as many app downloads as the average day in December, making it a potentially excellent payoff for those developers that were able to ship
before the holiday.