Apple saw twice as many mobile device activations this holiday as Samsung, data shows

Apple's iPhone and iPad trounced the competition this holiday, giving the company a 44 percent share of all device activations — Â more than twice that of rival Samsung, new research suggests.

Mobile analytics firm Flurry published its latest data on Tuesday, revealing that for every Samsung device that was activated, Apple saw more than two. Samsung came in second place with 21 percent share, far behind Apple but also well ahead of third-place finisher Huawei with just 3 percent.

The data shows that the smartphone and tablet market continues to be a two-horse race between Apple and Samsung, including during the lucrative holiday shopping season.

Flurry's research also shows that jumbo-sized handsets, like Apple's new iPhone 7 Plus, continue to take a larger share of the mobile market. So-called "phablets" accounted for 37 percent of device activations seen by Flurry this holiday, up from a 27 percent share in the 2015 shopping season.

Medium-sized phones between 3.5 and 4.9 inches, like the iPhone 7 and iPhone SE, still remain the most popular. However, their share dipped below 50 percent this year, to 45 percent. Apple does not sell a smartphone with a screen size smaller than 3.5 inches, and devices in that form factor represented just 1 percent of activations.

Flurry's data also suggests that the popularity of tablets, including Apple's iPad, continues to shrink. While full-size and small tablets took up 18 percent of device activations this year, they shrunk to 17 percent this year. That's down from 29 percent of mobile device activations in 2013.

Apple will announce the results of its December 2016 quarter — Â the first full frame to include iPhone 7 series sales — Â in late January. It's expected that this fall's iPhone sales will be Apple's strongest ever, with predictions skewing as high as 78 million units.

34 Comments

rotateleftbyte 12 Years · 1630 comments

About 7 years ago

This seems to indicate that Apple is doing something right yet an earlier article bemoans the fact that Siri lost out heavily to Alexa.

Perhaps the real fact is that for most Apple users something like Siri/Cortana/Alexa/Hey Google is just not that important in the grand scheme of things.

ericthehalfbee 13 Years · 4489 comments

Apple is absolutely trouncing Samsung.

What this fails to show is that not all of that 21% that Samsung activated represents phones like the Galaxy S7. Samsung still sells a lot of low-mid range Android phones. If you were to convert that to revenues you'd see Apple even further ahead. Likewise if you limited activations to high-end only devices.

rogifan_new 9 Years · 4297 comments

Is this just in the United States? and should we trust this data anymore than IDC or Slice Analytics?

Soli 9 Years · 9981 comments

rotateleftbyte said:

This seems to indicate that Apple is doing something right yet an earlier article bemoans the fact that Siri lost out heavily to Alexa.

Perhaps the real fact is that for most Apple users something like Siri/Cortana/Alexa/Hey Google is just not that important in the grand scheme of things.

The other article had a convoluted title. Since the Amazon Echo and Dot have no competitor from Apple we're expected to see Amazon excel in that area (at least until Google Home takes over), but clearly devices that support Siri far outnumber anything Amazon makes that supports Alexa. Hell, even the iPhone alone will trounce everything from Amazon, but on the flip side the number of new phones that support Google Now will trump every device Apple makes that supports Siri.

leavingthebigg 11 Years · 1291 comments

rotateleftbyte said:

This seems to indicate that Apple is doing something right yet an earlier article bemoans the fact that Siri lost out heavily to Alexa.

Perhaps the real fact is that for most Apple users something like Siri/Cortana/Alexa/Hey Google is just not that important in the grand scheme of things.

I and my Twitter followers have decided to call out fake news about Apple. There is a lot of fake news!

When an analyst published a story about Amazon possibly become the first trillion dollar company last week, I showed that to reach $1 trillion Amazon would have an additional Apple's evaluation to close to the $1 trillion mark.

This week Fortune published an article about an analyst claiming Microsoft could become the first $1 trillion company. I immediately contacted the Fortune author and informed her of last week's article. Now waiting for a Fortune update that questions what analysts are reporting.

Another analyst (IDC) claimed Alexa, Echo were the leaders. The author was immediately called out as being wrong.

A lot of people are producing fake news and need to be called out for doing so.