Apple wins Christmas -- at least in terms of new mobile activations

A new year-end report from mobile analytics firm Flurry suggests the lion's share of new mobile devices activated over the last week are running iOS, as Apple accounts for 49.1 percent of new mobile device activations worldwide between December 19th-25th.

That's Christmas week, and the ensuing high volume of gifts given worldwide makes the dominance of Apple's platform notable for mobile game makers hoping to take advantage of a new influx of customers.

Given that Apple is the only company making iOS devices, this also suggests that iOS and its biggest competitor Android were neck-and-neck in terms of new device activations. 

In fact, Flurry claims this is actually a slight slip downward for Apple, which had 51.3 percent of new mobile device activations during the same period last year. The difference was made up by Android device manufacturer (and seemingly closest competitor) Samsung, which rose just over 2 percent year-over-year to account for 19.8 percent of new devices activated last week.

As in years past, Christmas was once again reported to be the biggest day for new mobile app installs across both iOS and Android, with Flurry reporting a 120 percent jump in daily average installs on December 25th -- Christmas day. Of course, the firm is reporting all of this based on tracking data from roughly 780,000 mobile apps.