Angry Birds triples its downloads on Christmas Day

Rovio saw a record 6.5 million downloads of its Angry Birds games on Christmas Day, the company said. That compares to about 2 million downloads on Apple iOS (iPhone, iPod, iPad) and Android on Christmas Day 2010.

The numbers show that the popular bird-slinging game hasn’t lost its allure for smartphone and tablet users, even though the games have already been downloaded hundreds of millions of times. The numbers are almost as big as the total number of phone activations on Christmas.

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“We’re really excited to have such a massive number of new people get acquainted with Angry Birds over the holidays — we have exciting new releases lined up for 2012 and can’t wait to introduce them to the public,” Rovio’s Ville Heijari told AllThingsD.

Rovio’s downloads include a mix of paid and free downloads for three titles: Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio.

Overall, the Christmas holiday week saw a huge growth in apps downloaded. Analytics firm Flurry said that 6.8 million smartphones were activated on Christmas Day. And the number of apps downloaded in a week crossed the 1 billion mark for the first time last week, for the seven days ended Dec. 31.

Overall, in 2011, Apple’s App Store is expected to exceed 10 billion downloads and the Android Market is expected to hit life-to-date downloads of 10 billion as of December.