Apple’s iPhone 6 Sales Drive App Downloads Sky-High In October

Apple has likely handily broken sales records with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and new app download numbers from app marketing firm Fiksu give us even more reason to believe that’s true. Fiksu’s October App Store Competitive Index found that app downloads through the month were up 42 percent over their September total, and up 39 percent year-over year, reaching a record high of 7.8 million across the top 200 free iOS apps.

Fiksu’s index saw a massive jump in download activity because new iPhone 6 device owners were avidly loading their hardware up with new apps, the marketing firm says. Many of these initial downloads are re-downloads of apps that consumers consider “vital,” and as a result the company saw a decline in its “cost per loyal user” measure. The takeaway for developers is that the best time to nurture customer loyalty is around the launch of new hardware, Fiksu says.

Regardless of how much of the new activity is redownload, the key takeaway here is that Apple’s latest iPhone launch is very likely to not just break, but blow away previous smartphone hardware sales records. If we were to extrapolate that a 40 percent increase in app downloads translates to an equivalent increase in the sale of devices, Apple will have sold roughly 70 million iPhones in the holiday quarter this year, easily a record for the company, and in line with analyst predictions.