The battle between Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems spans the globe, and their popularity has surged in China enough to lead the country to the very top of the global smart-device heap.
As of Monday, China is now the largest smart-device market in the world, passing the United States only one year after it became the globe's fastest-growing Android and iOS market.
In November 2012, the mobile app service Flurry declared China would surpass the U.S. iOS and Android-installed base by February. At the end of the month, the company estimates that China will have 246 million active smart devices, compared to 230 million in the United States.
Flurry says the United States has virtually no chance of retaking the lead, mostly thanks to the significant population gap between the two countries — the U.S. is home to more than 310 million people, but that number is relatively meager compared to China's 1.3 billion.
To help illustrate just how rapid China's growth has been, we can take a look at some year-to-year statistics: The United States added 55 million Android and iOS devices during 2012, while China tacked on over 150 million. That's almost half of the U.S. population in one year; there's just not much the U.S. can do to compete with that.
Considering the States' rank as the third most populous country in the world, the only other population in the world with a chance of competing at China's level is the 1.2 billion individuals in India. That would be a tall order, though, especially since India only has 19 million active devices at the moment.
To record its data, Flurry tracked more than 2.4 million anonymous application sessions per day over more than 275,000 applications worldwide. The company claims it accurately measures activity across more than 90 percent of the world's smart devices.
Although China's growth rate in the smartphone arena continues to trend above 200 percent, that currently places it in sixth place, behind Columbia, Vietnam, Turkey, Ukraine and Egypt.
