WhatsApp, the hugely popular cross-platform messaging system available to Android and iOS, saw out 2012 with an incredible bang. The company has announced that it processed a staggering 18 billion messages on New Year’s Eve alone, exceeding its previous record of 10 billion messages processed last August.

Smartphones and tablets have been the hottest Christmas gifts in recent years, and the 2012 holidays were by far the biggest yet for Android and iOS. A new study from mobile analytics firm Flurry has found that a record-breaking 17.4 million Android and iOS devices were activated on Christmas Day, leading to an equally record-breaking 328 million app downloads.