It looks like Kris Kringle spent quite a bit of time delivering iPhones and iPads this year. Apple still remains very much in the dominant position for the tech logo people find most under their Christmas trees. The company garnered almost half of the market share — 49.1 percent, to be exact — for device activations this holiday season, far ahead of the usual runner-up, Samsung.
The data comes from Flurry Analytics, which tracks over 780,000 apps and reported about the holiday shopping season for December 19 to December 25.
Even though Samsung continues to lag behind, Apple did lose 2.2 percentage points this year almost exclusively to Samsung, which gained 2.1 percent market share. Flurry attributes this to the launch of the Galaxy Grand Prime, Core Prime and S6 during 2015.
Photo: Flurry Analytics
Meanwhile, Nokia slipped down to 2 percent from 5.8, LG holds 1.7 percent and the Xiaomi now claims the fifth place spot with 1.5 percent. Basically, Apple and Samsung continue to duke it out on top while the rest of the competition fight over the pie crumbs.
Since Flurry has access to so many apps, it was able to reveal a number of other statistics about which devices were most popular for the holidays.
The firm also looked at the various devices we crave, large and small. The form factor that saw the most growth this year is phablets, now with 27 percent market share of tablets and smartphones combined. Just two years ago, phablets only took 4 percent share and last year had 13 percent. Many people once thought that phablets would slowly replace tablet use, but this year they actually grew at the expense of small and medium-sized smartphones. Tablet share only dropped 4 percent cumulatively while medium phones alone lost 9 percent market share for the week leading up to Christmas.
Photo: Flurry Analytics
Of course, once Christmas Day comes along, the first task new users set out to accomplish is to fill up their new devices with apps. Once again, Flurry reports that Christmas Day is the most popular day of the year to download apps. Users downloaded 2.2x more than on the average day throughout the rest of the month.
Judging by the stats from this year, 2016’s holiday wish lists will probably have more phablets on them, even less tablets and likely remain loyal to Apple or Samsung.
Check out Flurry’s report for the full stats on mobile device activations this holiday season.
