Developers had good reason to race to meet Apple's Thursday cutoff for submitting apps to the App Store: Despite little else going on this holiday week, an estimated 1 billion apps are expected to be downloaded. That estimate comes from research firm Flurry. In response, Google Senior Vice President Andy Rubin tweeted that 3.7 million Android devices were activated on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Apple execs don't tweet such things. Flurry estimated that 6.8 million Android and iOS devices were activated on Christmas Day alone. It didn't break out numbers between the two operating systems. It also said 242 million apps were downloaded on Sunday, and 150 million on Christmas Eve. The numbers put Apple’s App Store on track to reach 10 billion downloads for 2011. (Google’s Android Market has topped 10 billion downloads in total.) Over the first 20 days of the month, the demand for apps was up 125 percent compared with the same period last year,  which mean the market for app developers is going gangbusters as well. Flurry concluded its report by saying:

With this record-breaking year coming to a close, we eagerly look forward to 2012, with all signs pointing toward accelerating growth.  Here’s to a Happy New Year for app developers.