At first glance, it looks like another huge festive win for Apple, but the company’s hold on the market dropped slightly from 51.3 percent in 2014, while Samsung increased its holiday sales by 2.1 percent. Flurry puts this down to not only the Galaxy S6’s popularity, but also lower-cost alternatives like the Grand Prime and Core Prime — the latter being popular on pay as you go services around the world, and therefore an ideal present.
Microsoft-branded phones were already a rarity under the Christmas tree in 2014 at 5.8 percent, and even rarer this year, but it wasn’t the worst performer. Sony scraped into Flurry’s chart with a 1.6-percent share last year, but disappeared entirely in 2015. Instead, Chinese brand Xiaomi stole its share, and grabbed 1.5 percent of activations over the period. This proves Xiaomi’s growing influence, given it’s only officially sold in parts of Asia, where Christmas isn’t a major gift-giving time.
In addition to showing that Apple still remains supreme as presumably the most requested and received mobile gift, Flurry’s data also highlights how phablet-sized devices are still increasing in popularity, at the expense of mid-sized phones rather than tablets. The data shows phablets made up 27 percent of mobile devices activated, up from 13 percent last year, while mid-size phones fell from 64 percent last year to 54 percent this year. Tablets also fell in popularity, but only from 11 percent to 9 percent.
