Mobile Device and App Trends in China
As re-mentioned yesterday by Flurry, China has surpassed the US to become the country with the largest smartphone device user base. This was of course originally reported on back in February when Flurry drew the original conclusion.
In fact, earlier this year in June Flurry had deduced that China had over 261 million smartphones and tablets. This number represents an astounding 24% of the entire worlds connected user base that flurry measures. As can be observed in the chart below the Worldwide Growth rate compared to China’s.
While manufacturing behemoths like Apple, Samsung,and Xiaomi lead the way with: 35,15, and 16 percent, China’s own Huawei did come out on top in the “Other” category which consisted of over 18 different manufacturers.
Indeed it will be interesting to see how the local company fares against the foreign giants. Looking at what Chinese users like to do on their devices – games is where it’s at (for both Android and iOS).
Time spent by App Category for each OS breaks down like so:
Android:
- 56% Games
- 20% entertainment
- Then around 5% or so for Tools/Utilities and even less for social.
iOS:
- 47% Games
- 30% Newsstand
- 9% Tools / Utilities
- and the rest are inconsequential.
See the image below for more details.
When the question of, “Where do Chinese Device Owners Over-index?” is asked, things look like this (see below):
As to whether or not China’s Expontential Growth will Change the Device and App Markets, personally, I think in many ways yes, as this data (if taken into consideration) is certainly going to affect how developers decide on where they want their main market to be. Not to mention the differences in audiences between here (the US) and in China, and other emerging markets as well.
No doubt, it will be interesting to see if someone can pull off the same scale of success that Angry Birds has here in the US but in China.
Kevin is an Online and Mobile Marketing Strategist who has worked with companies of all sizes over the last 6 years. You can follow Kevin on any of the social platforms below.
