Mobile devices break records over holiday season

One of the more exciting parts of receiving a tablet or smartphone during the holiday season is downloading all of the applications that can turn the devices into just about everything. More people than ever before are embracing the technology and the last few weeks saw records fall.

Mobile analytics firm Flurry released a new study that found during the week of December 25 through December 31, 1.76 billion iOS and Android mobile applications were download, which is a record for a single week. On top of that, 50 million devices were activated. By comparison, 1.2 billion were downloaded in 2011.

On an average week, 1.07 billion applications are downloaded. During the post holiday week, there was a 65 percent increase.

Peter Farago, the vice president of marketing for Flurry, recapped the report in a blog post for the company's website. According to him, Flurry sees the trend to continue in 2013. The company expects the trend of one-billion weeks to become the norm and could bypass the two-million download per week threshold during the final quarter of the year.

"Following a year where Google and Apple drove unprecedented adoption of mobile devices, Facebook declared itself a 'mobile' company, and Amazon and Microsoft both made significant investments into mobile computing, we look forward to continued record-breaking adoption of smart devices and applications," wrote Farago.

A recent CSO article mentioned that economic and security concerns will continue to make sense for enterprise going into 2013. This is not just because more employees are embracing mobile devices, but there are more gets out there with increasingly complex functionality.

IT departments need to be aware of bring-your-own-device policies as well as the network security and cabling solutions required to properly run the system. Trusted IT consultants like CTI Technology can help organizations of any size handle these challenges.