How many Apple users are in China?

Greater China.

As previously reported, China represented 18% of net sales for Apple in the fourth quarter of 2025. This was up from 15% the year before and the third largest reporting segment. The segment grew by 37.9% year-on-year.

It's time to understand precisely how big this market is in terms of users, iPhone install base and device install base, with an eye toward understanding the history and potential for growth.

First, it's important to note that Apple refers to "Greater China" (GC) not just China. That means within this reporting segment are Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao. The populations are approximately, 1.4 billion, 23.2 million, 7.5 million and 700k respectively.

Second, the population of smartphone users has been growing dramatically. In 2016 there were about 690 million (GC) and in 2025 the number is about 997 million. The forecast for 2029 is 1.08 billion.

Third, the share of iOS has been rising but at different rates in the three regions (Macao is excluded because of small relative size, but Apple is holding iOS share steady at about 60%.)

These graphs represent the trends in Mobile OS share as collected by Statcounter and trendlines for iOS are shown with projections to 2029.

Multiplying the share numbers by the user numbers, including projections gives the following iOS users summary.

The 2025 total is about 236 million users. The forecast for 2029 is 260 million, an increase of roughly 24 to 25 million. This forecast however is an extrapolation of the growth in Taiwan and HK with mainland growth being quite flat historically. This is due to relatively low churn. I believe there is room to accelerate mainland growth.

To understand the logic, here are some share numbers:

• Apple has about 17% of the installed base of smartphones but 16% of population as users. Both have significant room to grow.
• December quarter revenues per installed phone is $98.37/installed iPhone/quarter, well above global average of $88/installed iPhone/quarter signaling an opportunity to expand into lower price bands for share gains.
• A 20% share of population is foreseeable which would result in a gain of 57 million users, 25 million of whom are expected to be gained outside Mainland. This would imply Mainland additional user potential at 32 million, or 8 million new users per year, not a huge feat out of 1 billion addressable users.

This new projection implies the following GC market size for 2030:

• 290 million Apple users (57 million new)
• 320 million iPhones in use (62 million new)
• 450 million Active Devices (88 million new)

This is arguably "organic" growth without significant new product development or introductions.

In future articles I'll expand on this forecast for all other reporting segments building to a regional level view of growth in active devices and users.