The Flurry research group (http://www.flurry.com) has quantified China’s meteoric adoption of iOS and Android applications. While China ranked 10th in application sessions at the beginning of 2011, it finished the year in second place, trailing only the United States. 

With its large population and rapidly emerging middle class, adoption of apps vaulted China into the position of world’s second largest app economy.  In additional analysis, Flurry also determined that China has the most market upside, based on calculating those in China who can afford smartphones versus the current installed base.

Flurry's latest report reveals that, for the first time ever, China now leads in new smart device adoption (iOS and Android smartphones and tablets). For the study, the research group used its entire data set, tracking more than 1 billion anonymous, aggregated application sessions per day. More than 60,000 companies use Flurry Analytics across more than 160,000 applications.

In January 2011, the U.S. accounted for 28% of the world’s total iOS and Android device activations, while China accounted for 8%. In February, Flurry calculated that China surpassed the United States in monthly new iOS and Android device activations for the first time in history. China is now the world’s fastest growing smart device market. 

For March, Flurry projects that China accounted for 24% of all iOS and Android device activations, while the U.S. accounted for 21%.  With China now activating more devices per month than the U.S., this means that the gap is closing between the two countries in terms of installed base.  Not only is China already the second largest app economy, but also could eventually overtake the U.S. as the country with the largest installed base of smart device users. 

Flurry estimate that the U.S., a more mature market, currently has more than twice as many active devices than China.  However, China, a faster growing, emerging market, already has twice as large an installed base as the next largest market, the UK.