51% of new devices activated during Christmas week were Apple, 18% were Samsung, 6% Nokia
Apple and Apps Dominated Christmas 2014 — Millions of people woke up and unwrapped a shiny new device under the Christmas tree. As we have done in years past, Flurry examined these new device activations …
Context & Ripple Effects
Flurry's annual Christmas-week tally put Apple at 51% of new device activations in 2014, with Samsung at 18% and Nokia at just 6% — a snapshot that became a recurring benchmark. Two days earlier, IBM's retail data showed iOS driving 27% of mobile Christmas Day online sales, nearly 4x Android, so gift-giving season was already concentrating on Apple hardware.
The follow-on coverage shows what happened to that lead: by 2016 iOS had slipped to 44% of holiday activations while Samsung held 21%, and in 2017 Samsung climbed to 26% against flat 44% iOS — Apple's dominance eroding into a two-vendor duopoly even as iPhones still dominated the top activated models by Christmas 2020, when total US activations fell 23% YoY.
First-order effects
- Apple enters January with the largest single-week expansion of its installed base of the year, and developers' holiday app revenue skews toward iOS — consistent with IBM's finding that iOS carried nearly 4x Android's mobile commerce share that same week.
Second-order effects
- Samsung is positioned as the volume counterweight on Android, a role its later holiday numbers confirm as its share rose from 18% in this report to 21% then 26% across the 2016-2017 tallies, while Nokia's 6% marks it as a shrinking third force in gifting-season activations.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern in the later coverage holds — iOS share plateauing near 44%, Samsung rising, then total activations falling as budgets shift to cheaper devices like the LG K30 — the holiday activation index matures from a growth signal into a market-share battleground between two vendors, with overall device demand saturating.
The trend: Holiday device activations are evolving from an annual gauge of Apple's ecosystem pull into a mature, saturated market where Apple and Samsung split share and unit growth gives way to replacement cycles.