All Android’s wishes come true with 3.7 million activations this Christmas

Google had a very merry festive season this year with over 3.7 million Android activations on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, according to Google’s Senior Vice President of Mobile, Andy Rubin.

Rubin, who co-founded Android in 2003 before it was acquired by Google in 2005, took to Google+ to make the announcement adding to previous news that 700,000 Android devices are now being activated every day. This is up from 500,000 earlier in the year.

Meanwhile, the mobile app analytics service Flurry (@FlurryMobile), which claims that its software is installed on so many apps that it “detects roughly 100% of all new iOS and Android devices activated each day,” reports that Christmas Day saw 6.8 million iOS and Android devices activated: a 353% increase compared to the rest of December.

Whether Flurry’s definition of an activation matches Google’s we’re not sure.  Earlier in the week Rubin clarified how Google counts the number of activated Androids, “we count each device only once (i.e., we don’t count re-sold devices), and “activations” means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service.”

The Christmas Day activation spike, Flurry reports, was up 140% on Christmas Day 2010, the previous record holder.  If their and Google’s data is accurate then that would suggest that roughly about 3.1 million iOS devices were activated this holiday season.  We’ll report more on this if Apple releases its figures.

The company also reports that 242 million smartphone apps were downloaded on December 25 up 125% from 108 million for the rest of December.  7pm to 9pm was the app download prime time, although Flurry says that elevated downloads were seen throughout the day, with the spike beginning at 7am and ending at 4am on December 26;

“We notice Christmas downloads dominate each hour of the day.  From 8 AM to Midnight, there are over twice as many downloads per hour.  And already by 9 AM, hourly downloads on Christmas exceeded 10 million.  At its zenith, from 7 PM to 9 PM, hourly downloads exceeded 15 million.  Between 11 AM to 11 PM, more than 175 million apps were downloaded.  By itself, this half day delivers over 70% more downloads than the entire baseline day.”

On Christmas Eve 150 million apps were downloaded.  This number is probably down to people downloading apps before they gift the device and those who exchange gifts on December 24. Over the Christmas Week, until New Years Day, the company expects over 1 billion apps to be downloaded.