8 million Angry Bird downloads over Christmas

Friday, January 4, 2013

While most developers sat and waited for iTunes Connect to come back online after Christmas and hope for soaring numbers in their app download reports, it seems once again - the Angry Birds team has trumped us all.

On Christmas day alone their staple app "Angry Birds" was downloaded over 8 million times! While some of you developers might be ready to turn away and ignore their success because it seems all to often, stop and think about this for a second.

Christmas is the prime season for most new owners to hit the app stores. Angry Birds might have been downloaded a bunch, but I think we also need to recognize that these were likely 8 million NEW owners.

A top game like Angry Birds is almost a given for most new owners to download. It shows up front-and-center on most app store searches and has been raved about for years so downloading it is normal behavior.

But if these were 8 million new users, that means the mobile user community grew by explosive numbers this past Holiday season, and that should give other developers reason to celebrate on their own because we now have a large audience to market our apps to.

While the user base continues to grow in mobile, the developer base hasn't seen such growth which means visibility just came a little easier..