Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s App Store Had a Very Merry Christmas

On any given day, the top 200 apps in Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)‘s App Store account for roughly $5.4 million in revenues, according to research firm Distimo. Originally reported by Examiner, these totals are significantly higher than those received by Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)‘s Play store, which “average about $680,000 per day for its top 200 apps.”

On Christmas Day in particular, Distimo (via Apple Insider) found that Apple’s App Store downloads increased by 87% over sales between Dec 1st and Dec 24th of this year. While this is to be expected, revenues also spiked by 70% compared to monthly averages.

Doing a bit of back-of-the-envelope arithmetic between both studies, we can calculate that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s App Store should have made a little over $10 million from its top 200 apps on Christmas day, a boost that was also supported by industry-wide hardware gains.

According to data analytics firm Flurry, “more iPhones, iPads, Galaxy’s, Kindle Fires, and more, were activated than on any other day in history,” on Christmas Day. Here’s a segment from the report:

“Over this period [Dec 1st through Dec 20th], daily activations averaged around 4.0 million per day, with variance of a few hundred thousand in either direction per day. On Christmas Day, activations soared to more than 17.4 million, a 332% increase over the December baseline. By comparison, Christmas Day 2011 held the previous single-day record, having reached 6.8 million device activations. Christmas 2012 is more than 2.5 times larger than Christmas 2011”

That’s not all though; Flurry also grouped activations in terms of hardware. Continue reading on the next page…

Flurry also focused on tablet activations, mentioning that “more tablets were activated than smartphones” compared to the traditional 4:1 advantage that smartphones hold.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s iPad and iPad Mini saw gains, but the study points to Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)‘s Kindle Fire HD 7″ model in particular, finding that activations increased “by several thousand percent over its baseline of tablet activations over the earlier part of December.”

While we don’t know specific totals per company, it’s encouraging to see that aggregate activation activity had their best day in history on Christmas; Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) bulls have to be feeling cheery about the data presented above.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below, and for more Apple coverage, continue reading here:

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