Flurry: 44% of devices activated during Christmas week were from Apple, 21% from Samsung, and 3% from Huawei

Every year, Christmas week brings in the highest number of new device activations and app installs. 2016 also had Hanukkah to help, but the main result was the same: Apple dominated the results.

Just under half of device activations (44 percent) were for an Apple device this Christmas, down from 49.1 percent last year. One in five were Samsung devices (21 percent, up from 19.8 percent), with the rest of companies settling for single digits under 5 percent.

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Flurry’s data is global, although it is naturally skewed towards those that use its platform. The Yahoo-owned mobile analytics and advertising firm supports nearly 250,000 developers, reaching more than 800,000 apps across more than 2 billion devices with 10 billion sessions every day. This is the basis used to determine which devices were purchased and which apps were the first to be downloaded and installed.

Microsoft unsurprisingly fell out of the list, while Huawei showed up to the party for the first time. The Apple-Samsung duopoly was as stark as ever:

Keep in mind that throughout the year, Samsung dominates in phones and Apple wins in tablets. Aside from Samsung, Asian manufacturers typically don’t see much of a jump around this time of year, as Christmas is not the biggest gift-giving day in their home markets — Singles’ Day is much bigger in China, for example. Flurry also noted that Google struggled to make a mark with its new Pixel and Pixel XL this holiday season.

As for the form-factor breakdown, Christmas 2016 kept up a trend of the past few years: a big jump in the number of phablets activated. In the week leading up to Christmas, 37 percent of new device activations were phablets (compared to 27 percent in 2015, 13 percent in 2014, and just 4 percent in 2013):

In 2013 and 2014, the rise of phablets came at the expense of tablets. In 2015 and 2016, smaller-sized phones took the biggest hit.

Unsurprisingly, new device activations result in more apps being downloaded and installed. More specifically, Flurry tracked two times the number of app installs on Christmas Day compared to an average day in the first three weeks of December, slightly down but in line with last year.

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