What you need to know about China’s 700 million smartphones and tablets

By the end of 2013, China had 700 million active smart devices, according to the latest report from Umeng, the country’s largest app analytics platform. 59 percent of those replaced consumers’ previous smartphones and tablets.

Phones and tablets priced above US$500 made up 27 percent of the total. Umeng points out the users of these high-end devices have a diverse range of needs, but users on the other end of the spectrum – below US$150 – tilt toward casual games.

Samsung and Xiaomi make up all of the top 10 most popular Android devices. Note that Lenovo and Huawei are more popular by brand than Xiaomi, but their users are spread out among a wider array of tablet and smartphone models.

(See: 351 million new smartphones shipped in China in 2013: IDC)

The number of jailbroken iOS devices was cut by more than half last year, falling 17 percent to just 13 percent overall.

While 4G is growing, Umeng predicts uptake won’t really take off until next year, similar to the slow uptake of 3G around 2011.

Social is the secret sauce

As for the apps on all those devices, Umeng notes:

Socializing your apps is the key to success for developers. Currently among the top 1,000 apps (apps and games) in the Chinese market, 55 percent of them provide links to Chinese social networking services (e.g. Sina Weibo, Wechat, QQ, Renren). The amount of app content sharing to social network platforms per mobile Internet user per day has tripled in the last 6 months.

The trend is popular among all social networks, and 48 percent of in-app sharing traffic to social networks comes from games.

Umeng also notes that 2013 marks the first year that Chinese developers took intellectual property seriously. Out of the top 100 games, about 20 of them licensed a third party’s IP.

Umeng’s data is based on 210,000 Android and iOS apps on its platform from January to December 2013. You can check out its full report below.