The one billion app download barrier was broken last week in the festive season of Christmas and New Year, claims a fresh study conducted by Flurry. More than a billion iOS and Android applications were downloaded in the last week of 2011, from December 25 till 31.
Going by the Flurry blog post, the past week saw the most number of downloads as compared to any other week in the year gone by. Application developers must surely have benefited from this holiday fervor as last week has been reported to be the biggest one for device activations and app downloads in the history of iOS and Android.
The figures show a humongous, 6.8 million iOS and Android devices that were activated on Christmas and 242 million applications had apparently been downloaded. The week after December 25, users are said to have activated more than 20 million iOS and Android gadgets and downloaded about 1.2 billion applications.
As far as countries that contributed in touching the 1 billion mark go, the U.S. leads the pack with its residents having downloaded almost 509 million apps and thus occupying a whopping 42.3 percent share. This comes as no surprise as in the U.S. alone, there were 109 million iOS and Android activated devices out of the 246 million that is claimed by the entire globe.
China came second and proved that it indeed is the second largest app market in the world. Deeper penetration of Apple and Android devices has resulted in these record breaking statistics and Flurry reports that this may become commonplace in the coming months and years as technology keeps advancing.