Apple's iOS, Android Duke It Out Over Holiday Sales

Analytics firm Flurry has estimated some 6.8 million iOS and Android device activations on Christmas day.

In a Dec. 27 posting on its corporate blog, Flurry described that activation number as "a 353 percent increase over the baseline" of the average for the first 20 days of December. For Christmas 2010, the firm noted some 2.8 million activations.

"There were 3.7 million Android devices activated on 12/24 and 12/25," Andy Rubin, senior vice president of Google's mobile efforts, tweeted Dec. 28. If that number proves true, and iOS took the significant majority of the other activations during that period, it means the two operating systems are indeed within striking distance of one another, numbers-wise.

Applications also experienced a year of significant growth, according to Flurry. "Apple's App Store is on pace to exceed 10 billion downloads, which will double the cumulative number of downloads earned across 2008, 2009 and 2010," the Flurry blog added. "The Android Market also set records, more than tripling its life-to-date downloads of 3 billion, reached in May 2011, to now over 10 billion cumulative downloads reached this December."