Apple Continues to Dominate Holiday Sales [Charts]

Apple continued to dominate holiday sales in 2015, according to data analysis from Flurry Analytics. The company used data from the over 780,000 apps it tracks to make several interesting observations.

Notably, consumers are gravitating towards larger smartphones (phablets).

Back in 2013, only 4% of new device activations during the week leading up to Christmas were phablets. Fast forward two years and a whopping 27% of all new devices were phablets. That’s doubling share in only 12 months!




While previously, it appeared that phablets were just stealing market share from tablets, it's now clear that users are opting for phablets instead of smaller phones. Phablets accounted for over 50% of all Android devices and about 12% of Apple devices activated during Christmas week. The new iPad Pro is grouped into “Full-Size Tablets” and represented less than 1% of device activations.



Looking at the top manufacturers, Apple was number one with 49.1% of all new devices (down 2.2% from last year). Samsung came in at 19.8% (up 2.1% from last year). Microsoft lost market share dropping from 5.8% to 2%. Sony fell out of the top five and Xiaomi placed fifth with 1.5% market share. Considering Xiaomi is not in the United States and Christmas is not the biggest gifting day of the year in China, this is considered a significant achievement.




It terms of apps, Christmas was once again the biggest day of the year for app downloads. Flurry tracked 2.2x as many app installs on Christmas Day as on an average day in December.

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