A recent report from Flurry showed that the final week of the year saw a huge number of app downloads, thank largely to the fact that so many new devices were activated over Christmas. Of course, the US stands out as the biggest holiday app downloaders by far, with 509 million downloads in that week. But I was a little surprised to see China in the two spot with 99 million app downloads, even though the country is the world’s second largest app market.
According to the report, China has about one-third of the US’s install base, but about one fifth of the relative downloads for that time period. I’m uncertain as to whether Christmas would have had any substantial effect on Chinese gadget shoppers (Christmas sales weren’t a big thing when I lived there), but perhaps we can expect China’s holiday download spike during the upcoming Spring Festival holiday.
As of October, Flurry showed that China had surpassed markets like the UK, Australia and South Korea in app session market share [1] as you can see in the chart on the right. This growth likely shot even higher late in the year, after Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) began accepting app payments in China’s local currency, the RMB. Distimo said that the China download rate doubled after the new payment system went into place.
As for Android, it’s difficult to say exactly what kind of download rate China sees, because while the Android Market isn’t blocked, there is still no support for paid downloads. There is also a wide array of alternative app stores for Android users, and while we have no idea of the download rate for those — it’s likely pretty darn big.
But given the trajectory that we’ve seen from China over the past year, as well as China’s appetite for Apple and other smartphone alternatives, expect 2012 to be a very big year too.
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