Apple dominates holiday season smartphone sales at 44 percent of activations

By Christian de Looper Published December 28, 2016

Every year we take a look at the performance of our favorite devices and how they stacked up against each other. This year is no different, and (surprise, surprise!) Apple came out on top.

Yahoo-owned Flurry has published a report highlighting how this holiday season shoppers invested big in Apple. In fact, the company counts a hefty 44 percent of device activations during the holidays, followed by Samsung at 21 percent, then Huawei and LG at a somewhat lackluster 3 percent and 2 percent, respectively. If you had any doubt that Samsung and Apple were really the only major players in the smartphone game, let these stats put that doubt to rest.

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There are a few interesting things to note about these figures. For one, despite Samsung’s so-called year of disaster, the company inched up by around 1 percent compared to 2015. If the Galaxy Note 7 was as huge of a success as it was on track to be, Samsung likely would have jumped up far more than 1 percent. It’s doubtful it would have taken out Apple, but a good few more percentage points would have been expected. Huawei also exceeded expectations — it was barely on the charts in 2015 but made it to third place in 2016.

It seems like the Google Pixel didn’t really make much of a dent in the market, despite the fact that we’re expecting the device to have sold reasonably well on Verizon and the fact that Google has even had trouble filling all the demand for the Pixel. Perhaps in 2017 the phone will make more of an appearance.

While there are minor differences, the overall story is the same — Apple’s iPhone is the big seller during the holiday season.

Christian de Looper

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Christian de Looper is a long-time freelance writer who has covered every facet of the consumer tech and electric vehicle…

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