This year still had the largest figures to date, but the year over year increases are beginning to ease.
Over the holiday season, tablets and smartphones proved to be a highly popular gift, yet again, and it should therefore not come as a shock to anyone that the number of mobile app downloads broke another range of records in 2013.
This most recent gift giving season saw an increase of 91 percent in downloaded applications.
That rate was seen on Christmas day when compared to the average daily rate of mobile app downloads that was experienced for the rest of December up until that day. This data was reported in a recent publication by Flurry, a mobile measurements and analytics platform. That company examined the transfer of more than 400,000 applications in order to determine what recipients of new iOS and Android devices were doing with them after they were unwrapped as gifts from under the tree.
The research found that mobile app downloads also increased by 11 percent.
That growth figure was recorded between the number of downloaded applications on Christmas day 2013 when compared to the same day in 2012. As much as the numbers are still increasing and continue to break records, they are also starting to slow in their growth. The reason is believed to be that fewer consumers are receiving their devices for the first time. Though some have just obtained their first devices, many have obtained their second, third, or even fourth ones.
Consumers who already have smartphones and who have now received tablets, or who are receiving replacement devices already know what apps they like and trust. There is less experimenting to try out different things for the first time.
Flurry’s report explained that “New device activations do still spike on Christmas, but that spike is waning compared to years past, and it comes on top of a much larger installed base. That means that when new devices are loaded with apps, the overall impact on app download volume is not as big.”
It also pointed out that the largest increases in device ownership and mobile app downloads are typically in countries where there is a less significant importance placed on Christmas or where it is not celebrated.
