Australians have gone app crazy with millions of phone and tablet owners downloading applications over the Xmas New Year period.

Australians have gone app crazy with millions of phone and tablet owners downloading applications over the Xmas New Year period.

Analytics firm Flurry claims that right round the world consumers have gone crazy downloading apps many for the first time.

The US was responsible for nearly half of the downloads, followed by China and the UK. It’s estimated that over 4 Millions apps were downloaded in Australia. Flurry said that 1.2 billion apps were downloaded in the last week of December alone.

China achieved 99 million downloads while the USA US was out ahead with 509 million.

With 81 million downloads, the UK easily surpassed Canada (41 million), Germany (40 million) and France (40 million).

Activity was buoyed by the facts that many users received new devices for Christmas and firms offered discounted apps over the holiday period.

Flurry thinks this level of download activity will become more standard.

“Looking forward to 2012, Flurry expects breaking the one billion download barrier per week will become more commonplace,” the firm said in its blog..

“While [Apple] iOS and [Google] Android growth continues to amaze, the market is still by all measures relatively nascent.”

Unsurprisingly, Christmas proved a boom time for device makers. Flurry estimated that nearly seven million Android devices and iPhones were activated on Christmas Day.

Apple does not disclose such figures but Google confirmed that more than 3.7 million Android devices were activated over the Christmas weekend.