Christmas Day is increasingly the day that a flood of new phones and tablets come online; it regularly sets and breaks records for new device activations. This year was no exception, according to mobile analytics firm Flurry’s annual study , which found that 17.4 million devices were activated on December 25 this year, a 332 percent increase over activations covering December 1 – 20, and a 156 percent increase on the numbers from a year ago. Flurry’s data covers a catalog of 260,000 apps that use its mobile analytics platform, across Android, iOS and Amazon devices, and the firm claims it can account for roughly 90 percent of total new device activations given its reach. Not surprisingly, app downloads likewise spiked alongside the record activations, with 328 million app downloads on Christmas Day, a record high for a single day since Flurry started measuring app downloads. Downloads per hour peaked early at around 11 AM on the 25th, and remained high throughout the day until around 8:30 or 9 PM. While Christmas represents a single-day peak, Flurry projects that app downloads will remain high throughout the next week and into New Year’s Day, ending the holiday period with over 1.5 billion downloads, and possibly reaching as high as 2 billion total. Read more »