China has become a major force in the global app market, having risen to be the second largest market in terms of app sessions on iOS and Android devices, according to the latest figures from analytics firm Flurry.

At the beginning of 2011, China was ranked tenth globally for app sessions – in which an app is launched and used – but has seen a dramatic increase to now follow only the US as the world's biggest app markets.

Between the first quarters of 2011 and 2012, China saw a 1,100 percent increase in the number of app sessions.

While the US more than doubled the number of app sessions during the period, its total share declined from 56 percent to 46 percent, as markets in the rest of the world grew more quickly.

In the rankings for numbers of app sessions, the US and China were followed by the UK, South Korea, France, Australia, Canada, Japan, Germany and Spain. These countries collectively increased their number of sessions 3.4 times, boosting their total share from 27 percent to 30 percent.

The other 217 countries that Flurry takes data from grew collectively by more than four times, boosting their session share from 17 percent to 24 percent. “No matter how we slice it, the application market continues to grow at unprecedented rates, and increasingly across more borders,” Flurry said in a statement.

Flurry attributes China’s apps growth to the country’s emerging middle class and large population. The country also has significant market upside potential, when the amount of people who can afford a smartphone compared to the current installed base is taken into account.

The report – which used the entire Flurry dataset of 1 billion aggregated app sessions per day – also found that China is now the largest market in terms of the number of iOS and Android device activations per month, having overtaken the US.