It seems that smartphones were top of everyone’s Christmas lists this festive season with an estimate of over 20 million iOS and Android devices being activated between December 25th and 31^st according to a new report by Flurry. The report also found that a record breaking 1.2 billion apps were downloaded in the same week, known as “power week”.

The holiday “power-week” has become far more important for application makers than the run-up to Christmas and with the 60% surge in downloads in that week compared to the average, shown in the graph below; it’s easy to see why. This has led to a number of firms offering festive discount deals on apps with even Apple giving away free iOS apps through their ‘12 Days of Christmas’ app to encourage downloads.

According to Flurry’s report the US saw the most app activity with figures hitting 509 million compared to download figures of 81 million in the UK and, popular bird flinging app Angry Birds saw downloads of 6.5 million on Christmas Day alone. “Flurry expects breaking the one billion download barrier per week will become more commonplace” said vice president of marketing at Flurry, Peter Farago, as the number of mobile internet devices grows.