China Passes U.S. to become World’s Top Smart Device Market

China has passed the U.S. to become the world’s top country for active Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, a year after the country became the fastest-growing smart device market in the world, says amobile app services company Flurry.

Flurry sourced from its entire data set of over 2.4 billion anonymous, aggregated app session daily across over 275,000 applications around the world. The company says it reliably measures activity in over 90 percent of the world’s smart devices.

In January of this year, the U.S. and China were neck-and-neck in terms of their active smart device installed base, at 222 million and 221 million, respectively. By the end of this month, Flurry estimates that will change to 230 million in the U.S. and 246 million in China.

More importantly, the U.S. will not regain the lead after this shift occurs, due the size of China’s population (over 1.3 billion people vs. 310 million in the U.S.). In fact, the report notes, the only other country that could eventually challenge China is India, which has just over 1.2 billion people. But China’s smart device installed base is significantly larger than India’s, where today there are only 19 million active devices.

Of the top 10 countries leading in terms of active iOS and Android devices, the U.S. and China are by far in the lead – each has over 5 times more the active installed base than the third largest market, the U.K. Both also continue to see rapid active device adoption, says Flurry. The U.S. adding 55 million devices from January 2012 to January 2013. But during that time, China added 150 million. If it wasn’t for the holidays, which generally brings a surge of new activations to the U.S. market, China would have actually passed the U.S. sooner.

Credit. Tech Crunch