After crunching all the data from the 780,000 apps its tracks, Flurry Insights is back with the latest analysis of the holiday shopping season. So, which manufacturer took the crown this year? Well, according to Flurry, this year Apple has won the hearts (and money) of holiday shoppers . . . again.
Looking back over the past couple years, Flurry notes a surge in phablet sales: While in 2013 only 4% of new device activations were phablets during the week leading up to Christmas, this year they accounted for a stunning 27%.
An interesting addition to the phablet story is that it first appeared that phablets were stealing sales from tablets, but now phablets are apparently the choice of consumers who don’t want a smaller-sized phone. And, by the way, they don’t buy a giant phone instead of a tablet.
Apple’s phablets, the iPhones 6 and 6s Plus, have already commanded 12% of all device activations during Christmas week, despite being available only for a year. However, it does eat into sales of the iPad mini and medium phones.
Flurry didn’t add a new category for the iPad Pro; instead it is part of the Full-Size Tablets category and apparently represented less than 1% of device activations.
As we already said above, Apple has won the holiday shopping battle, accounting for 49.1% of all new device activations, which is down from 51.3% recorded last year. Samsung ranked second with 19.8%, up 2.1% compared to 2014, with sales driven by the new Galaxy Grand Prime, Core Prime, and S6. Microsoft’s Nokia dropped in popularity and this year accounted for only 2% of all new device activations.
