All that time off during the holidays paid off for app developers, with a record-breaking 1.2 billion global downloads combined from Apple’s App Store and Android Market, a big bump of 60 percent from early December.

Flurry Analytics released a report that showed the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve as a high point for iOS and Android downloads, with consumers eager to try out their new devices activating 6.8 million iOS and Android devices on December 25 and downloading 242 million apps on that day. That week, Flurry estimates the activation of over 20 million iOS and Android devices in addition to the billion-plus downloads.

We’ll let Flurry explain how they got these numbers:

For this report, Flurry leverages its data-set from over 140,000 apps running on the significant majority of iOS and Android devices. With its application penetration, Flurry can detect over 90 percent of all new devices activated each day. Additionally, with its analytics service in more than 20 percent of all applications downloaded on a given day from the App Store and Android Market, Flurry can reliably estimate total iOS and Android downloads. To benchmark against the market, Flurry regularly triangulates its device and download figures with data released publicly by Google and Apple.

The U.S. led the downloading craze with 509 million, which accounted for 42.3 percent of the total. China was a distant second, with 99 million downloads and the U.K. third at 81 million.

Flurry thinks we’ll see more of this downloading frenzy in the future: “Looking forward to 2012, Flurry expects breaking the one-billion-download-barrier per week will become more commonplace.”

We’ve definitely seen the rise of app fever with both the App Store and Android Market topping 18 billion and 10 billion downloads, respectively, as of early December.

And while the Amazon Appstore is still catching up with these two behemoths, it shows potential for accelerated growth, with the massive digital retailer touting 2011 as “the best holiday ever for the Kindle.” Throughout December, Kindles flew into the hands of customers, who purchased more than one million Kindle devices each week. And the latest in the line, the Kindle Fire, ended up as “the best-selling product on Amazon.com’s mobile website and across all of Amazon.com’s mobile applications.”

Via MSNBC

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