The Fitbit app has been crowned the most popular freebie this Christmas, its number of downloads being the highest among all free apps at the iTunes Store.

Fitbit is a line of fitness trackers first launched on the market in September 2009, and developed by a tech company based in San Francisco, California.

The wearable devices are able to provide users with real-time information regarding various metrics, such as sleep duration, number of calories burned, distance traveled (measured in miles, and in number of steps), elevation gain (number of floors climbed) etc.

On Christmas morning, the Fitbit health and fitness app managed to attract the largest number of customers on the iTunes App Store, and even now it’s ranked highest in the Free apps category, surpassing other hugely popular programs such as Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook.

The fact that the app designed for Fitbit wearables has become so in demand isn’t actually that surprising, given that the activity trackers have been selling like hot cakes in anticipation of the winter holidays.

On Monday, December 28, Amazon representatives have revealed that Fitbit Charge was in the top three most frequently shipped products ahead of Christmas, through Amazon Prime’s free same-day delivery.

On a side note, rounding up the top 3 among the buyers’ preferences were the Cards Against Humanity party game, and the Kindle Paperwhite e-reader.

Previously, market analysts had been quite reserved after Fitbit began having its shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on June 18.

Following the April launch of the Apple Watch, designed especially for monitoring health and fitness, it had been expected that Fitbit would be dealt a fatal blow, but instead the activity trackers have continued to soar in popularity, surpassing all predictions made by investors.

Sales for the second half of the year have been higher than all expectations, the company’s third-quarter revenue having increased by around 168% in comparison with last year’s figure.

In fact, James Park, Fitbit’s CEO and co-founder, has recently declared that Apple Watch didn’t really have a detectable, negative impact on sales, since it actually targets a completely different category of buyers.

As he explained, while Fitbit wearables usually cost somewhere between $60 and $250, the starting price of an Apple Watch is at $349, such a device fetching more than $1000 at times.

It appears that Park’s line of reasoning has proven correct, since Fitbit gadgets have remained one of the consumers’ top choices, being among the most traded products even in the days preceding Christmas.

Meanwhile, Apple Watch has also proven to be a successful business venture, the newly unveiled line of wearables boosting the company’s profits by around $1.2 billion, between the second and the third quarter.

Therefore, it appears that so fat both Fitbit and Apple Watch have been able to thrive simultaneously, without one of them negatively affecting the other one’s sales.

While Fitbit currently dominates the wearables industry, its second quarter sales of around 4.4 million units accounting for 22% of the total revenues in this sector, Apple Watch has managed to capture almost 20% of the market, which suggests that competition might become fierce after all, once 2016 begins.

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