The holiday season was a busy time of the year for iOS and Android, the mobile operating systems owned by Apple Inc. and Google Inc..
The week of Dec. 25-31 marked a record for iOS and Android device activations and application downloads, according to Flurry, a mobile app analytics firm.
Flurry estimates that more than 20 million iOS and Android devices were activated during the holiday week, while a whopping 1.2 billion apps were downloaded worldwide.
During what Flurry dubbed the "power week," the United States represented the largest number of downloads (509 million) with 42.3 percent global share, well ahead of the world's second-largest application market (China: 99 million downloads).
"It's important to note that the celebration of Christmas as a holiday impacted download performance. While the United States widely celebrates Christmas, China is largely non-religious, with over 60 percent of the population considering themselves agnostic or atheist," wrote Peter Farago, vice president of marketing with Flurry. "In China, Christians make up just 3-4 percent of the population."
