Report: February marks end of US lead in smart device users
updated 06:45 pm EST, Mon February 18, 2013
Flurry claims that China will pass US in total devices this month
According to analytics company Flurry, China's populace will have more active smartphones and tablets in use than the US by the end of February. More than 2.4 billion sessions per day across 275,000 application were tracked, which Flurry claims covers more than 90 percent of the world's smart devices. In its population of 1.3 billion people, Flurry estimates that by the end of the month, China will have 246 million devices activated, as compared to 230 million in the US amongst a population of 310 million.
Flurry believes that the US will not catch China, given the vast difference in population between the two countries and the existing growth rates of adoption between the two countries. The only possible country that could catch China in the future is Inida, with a population of over 1.2 billion -- but currently, with only 19 million active smart devices.
The top five countries leading active iOS and Android devices in January are the US with 222 million, China with 221 million, the UK with 43 million, South Korea with 30 million, and Japan with 29 million. Year-over-year from January 2012, the US added 55 million devices, with the Chinese installed base exploding to 150 million.
Flurry notes that Apple and Google have curated the "fastest adopted technology revolution in history" with the smartphone ecosystem. The portable technology has been adopted 10 times faster than the PC revolution of the '80s and '90s, and three times the rate of the Internet boom from the '90s to 21st century.
