Is India’s smartphone market bigger than the US’? Experts are divided.

Photo credit: Stefano Ravalli.

India has just surpassed the US to become the world’s second biggest smartphone market, next only to China. Or maybe not. The experts can’t quite agree.

India now has more than half of its population on mobile phones – 51 percent at the end of 2015.

But that’s ok because analysts have different ways of totting up the numbers. Short of doing a global census in which participation is mandatory, there’s no sure-fire way of knowing which country has the greatest number of active smartphone users.

Counterpoint’s senior analyst Tarun Pathak reckons India has just whizzed past this historic milestone, as he wrote on the market research firm’s blog.

However, data from Emarketer supplied to Tech in Asia shows that India won’t sail past the US until some point next year.

Counterpoint states that India had 220 million smartphone users at the end of 2015. Emarketer pegs it at 167.9 million at the same point in time, which will grow to 204 million in 2016 and then to 243.8 million in 2017 – at which point India will top the 219.8 million smartphone users projected to be in the US in that year.

This is India versus the US:

The data paints a picture of India’s base of smartphone users growing from 2013 to 2019. Growth is slowing as the market begins to mature, with only 21.5 percent growth projected from last year to 2016.

China, meanwhile, has an unassailable lead out in front, with 526 million active smartphone users in 2015. That’s forecasted to swell to 688 million in 2019.

India’s mobile adoption passes 50 percent