Americans opened 1.3 billion apps this year on Thanksgiving — a 68% jump

Thanksgiving is apparently the time to open apps as well as eat Turkey.

According to data released today by mobile analytics company Flurry, Americans initiated about 1.3 billion app sessions this year on Thanksgiving, a 68 percent jump from last year. The biggest winners were photo, video, and music apps, up 50 percent. Games were also up about 35 percent, while business and education apps, health and fitness apps, news apps, and travel apps all dropped by 20 percent or more.

In other words, we’re taking pictures, listening to music, playing games, and letting the outside world pass along.

“App usage overall in the U.S. spiked by 25% on Thanksgiving compared to the previous Thursday, and not just as a result of shopping app use,” Flurry data scientist Mary Ellen Gordon posted. “The overall pattern of app usage over the Thanksgiving weekend demonstrates that smartphones and tablets have become the first truly personal computers, changing their function as we change our routines.”

All told, app usage this year was triple the app usage from 2011.

That makes sense, of course: More of us have smartphones, and we’re using apps more often, compared to two years ago. Global smartphone sales just passed the 250 million mark in a single three-month period for the first time last quarter — more than half of the 418 million phones sold worldwide.

And in the U.S., smartphone penetration has passed 62 percent.