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Many news sites have reported perky news items about Flurry’s Christmas app download statistics. And most of them have been comprehensively out to lunch. The real news in Flurry’s numbers is not that Christmas Day app downloads once again bounced sharply from the average December day since that obviously happens every year. A truly gruesome bit of real news was buried in the exhibit that compares Christmas 2012 download volume growth to Christmas 2013: App download volume increased by 90% year-on-year back in 2012 but by just 11% in 2013. The Christmas app download volume growth has collapsed. This matters a great deal to the smartphone industry, because high-end smartphone sales depend on affluent markets where the Christmas bounce is big: The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy,