China's growing tech-savvy middle class has contributed to a sharp rise in mobile device sales over the past year, and new data reveals that the country has overtaken the U.S. to become the world's largest market for iOS and Android device activations for the first time.

In a report released on Wednesday, analytics firm Flurry found that in February Chinese mobile users activated more devices running the two top mobile operating systems, Apple's iOS and Google's Android, than any other country.

By tracking its entire data set of over 1 billion aggregated app sessions per day across 160,000 apps, Flurry was able to quantitatively measure the growth rate of device activations through software usage. An app session is characterized by the launch and use of a particular app, like opening a news reader and browsing articles for two minutes.

In looking at the 15 months following the first quarter of 2011, China gained 16 percent of the world market for new iOS and Android activations, jumping from 8 percent in January 2011 to an expected 24 percent by the end of March 2012. For comparison, the U.S. fell from a 28 percent share of new activations to 21 percent over the same period.

Interestingly, the growth of iOS and Android device activations in China remained fairly level until September 2011 when the country began its climb to the top. That month Apple launched the iPad 2 in China to an almost overwhelming demand that caused a brief suspension of sales due to rowdy crowds. The same rise in device activations was also seen in the U.S. during the same period, though a precipitous decline initiated in December brought the country's worldwide market share below China's by February.

Source:cn-c114.net