Record-breaking 1.2B iOS and Android apps downloaded during holiday week

New and bored smartphone owners alike went on a download spree last week, with a record-breaking 1.2 billion iOS and Android apps downloaded between Dec. 25th and 31st.

The staggering number of apps downloaded, courtesy of analytics firm Flurry, goes hand-in-hand with the report that 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day. Naturally, many new owners of these smartphones downloaded all kinds of games and apps to make their smartphone experience more useful and entertaining, with 242 million apps downloaded on Christmas.

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With those two reports together, the week from Dec 25th through the 31st set new records for number of smartphone activations and total number of apps downloaded. Flurry specifically estimates 20 million iOS and Android devices were activated. The company believes 1.2 billion apps were downloaded, which is a 60 percent increase from the first full week of December.

Most apps were downloaded in the United States, with 509 million downloads, or 42.3%. In second place was China with 99 million app downloads. Rounding out the top three was the United Kingdom with 81 million app downloads. Flurry appropriately notes that Christmas is widely celebrated in the U.S. and U.K., but not in China. But with the 1-billion-strong Chinese population hungrily buying smartphones, it appears they didn’t need a holiday to download a lot of apps.

Looking ahead to 2012, Flurry estimates that surpassing 1 billion app downloads per week will become a regular occurrence. The company rightly points out that iOS and Android adoption is “still by all measures relatively nascent” and with more phones sold around the world, many more apps will be consumed.