Jacob Hall, Editor-in-Chief of TapSauce | APPS | 01.04.2012 @ 12:16 pm
I don’t know about you guys, but I know a whole bunch of people who got tablets and smartphones as holiday gifts. Brothers. Sisters. Mothers. Fathers. Grandmothers. Not me, but don’t worry, I’ll live. Do you hear that friends and/or family? I’m getting by somehow, even though I don’t have a new iPad and/or iPhone. Hmph.
Anyway, there were nearly seven million new Android phones and iPhones activated on Christmas, which, when written out, looks like 7,000,000. That’s a lot of new smartphones and you can be guaranteed that many of them were gifts for new adopters. After all, what is the holiday season but an excuse to update your mobile technology on your mother’s dime? Naturally, with all of those sexy new devices comes a bunch of app downloads. How many app downloads are we talking about?
Try 1.2 billion from December 25 to the 31. When written out, that’s 1,200,000,000. This is the first time over a billion apps have been downloaded in a single week. .
To put these numbers in perspective, an average of 750,000,000 apps were being downloaded every week in the months leading up to the holidays. That’s certainly not a number to scoff at (that’s a lot of zeroes!), but the leap to the billion mark is a big milestone and it represents many people’s first journey into the various app stores to test the waters of the current mobile revolution. If you break it down by country, nearly half of those app downloads (about 509,000,000 of ‘em) came from the United States. China was number two, with 99,000,000 downloads. The full list (which you can see at the link below) represents just how widespread smartphone technology has become, listing everywhere from Canada to Malaysia to Saudi Arabia.
I suppose the next big countdown is this: how long until every mobile phone user becomes a smartphone user?