Yesterday, buried in a report on the fact that China is now the world’s largest producer of smartphones, China’s official news service dropped this little gem: “In 2012, over 730,000 Chinese apps were launched on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad platforms.”
That’s twice as many apps as reached the US app store in the same period.
In 2012, developers from every corner of the globe published 339,164 apps in Apple’s US app store, according to AppsFire, a discovery service for mobile apps.
Of course, Xinhua’s source is the China Academy of Telecommunication Research under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, so it’s possible that it measures the number of apps published in China differently from how AppsFire does. But even if these numbers are off by, say, a factor of two, it means that China’s iOS developers are at least as active as the sum total of coders building apps for the US, which has historically been the most active and lucrative app market on the planet.