Growing 401 percent year over year, China’s smartphone market is the fastest growing market in the world, according to new analytics by Flurry, the mobile analytics firm. Though currently second behind the US, China has set a pace to likely overtake the US market by Christmas.
The US adds about 30 million new active devices to the stream annually, while China contributes a whopping 100 million new devices. Claiming to detect more than 90 percent of all active iOS and Android devices in the world, Flurry calculated actual devices that ran apps, so its numbers differ from sales reports from the OEMs. The analytics firm followed more than 200,000 applications running on upward of 640 million devices.
The US currently has 165 million smartphone devices, while China has 128 million.
Coming in a distant third, the UK had 31 million active smartphone devices. South Korea has 28 million active smartphone devices, and Japan has 22 million active smartphone devices.
In terms of speed of adoption, Chile came in second behind China with 279 percent growth, while Brazil had 220 percent growth, Argentina 279 percent growth and Iran 196 percent growth.
All four BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) each ranked in the top 10 for growth, reflecting a continued evolution of economic development. Brazil came in third as the fastest growing active smartphone market at 279 percent, while Russia had 189 percent and India had 171 percent.
Smartphone penetration ranked highest in Singapore, Hong Kong and Sweden, countries with small populations. Among 15 to 64 year olds, Singapore had a whopping 92 percent penetration, while Hong Kong had 87 percent and Sweden trailed at 86 percent. The US, meanwhile, ranked fifth for smartphone adoption at 78 percent.
App usage in the US has declined as well. In 2011, about 52 percent of all app sessions took place in the US. This year, that number dropped to 36 percent, followed by 36 percent in the top 10 countries for smartphone usage and the remaining 28 percent in the rest of the world. For the first time, most apps are now used outside of the US at 64 percent.
Flurry pointed out that the rate of smartphone adoption far exceeds any other recent technological development. It grows 10 times faster than the ’80s PC revolution, twice as fast as the Internet boom in the ’90s, and three times faster than the adoption of social networks.
“Five years into the smart device growth curve, expansion of this new technology is rapidly expanding beyond early adopter markets such as such as North America and Western Europe, creating a true worldwide addressable market,” Flurry stated on its blog.