The applications market reached a first-ever milestone of the last week of 2011. Over one billion apps were downloaded in the span of one week. Resource for this article: More than a billion apps downloaded in a week

Apps explosion

On Christmas Day, there were 658 million mobile devices that were activated, according to Slashgear, which means application developers were bound to have a fantastic week. From Dec. 25 to Dec. 31, there were 1.2 billion app downloads in the Apple Application Store and Google Android Market, according to the Flurry Analytics report, which was released on Monday. That is a 60 percent jump from earlier in the month.

The Flurry report was very clear. It said:

"The last week of the year, from December 25 through December 31, sees more iOS and Android device activations compared to any other week of the year... Christmas Day [is] the largest single device activation day of the year. ... For application makers, this holiday 'power week' is far more important than the run-up to Christmas itself."

Where were they around the world?

The United States was by far the leader of the race, with 509 million applications downloaded. China ran a very distant second at 99 million downloads. The United Kingdom, with 81 million, came in 3rd. Canada, at fourth place, had 41 million downloads.

Probably common soon

As reported by Flurry, Christmas cannot possibly be the only reason for the extra downloads considering “over 60% of the population consider themselves agnostic or atheist” in China. Flurry claims that the app downloads will skyrocket this year making the billion a week rate more common. However, that does not consider that fact that Christmas is celebrated as a secular holiday by millions of people who are not Christian in both China and the States. Also, China had the second highest number of downloads.

Flurry might be right

As of early Dec., 2011, 18 billion downloads had been made from the Apple Application Store. The Android Market had counted 10 billion. It seems likely that Flurry is correct in that the apps market is exploding, with no sign of slowing down.

Sources

The Next Web

Slashgear

MSNBC