How big is mobile?
Over the last ten years, desktop usership has been fairly stagnant. During the last two years, however, there has been a noticeable decrease in the number of consumers who use a computer:
Look at those last two years (2014–2016). With the increasing popularity of smartphones, we’re not just talking about the rise of mobile. We’re talking about the decline of desktop.
As you would expect, the percentage of consumers who use a smartphone has been increasing:
Although I have displayed this data for a select few countries, it’s representative of global trends. You can explore the data for yourself using Google’s Consumer Barometer.
So, what does this data look like on the global scale? Well, 68% of consumers now use a smartphone but only 64% of consumers use a desktop device:
It’s official: more people worldwide now use smartphones than desktop computers.
Globally, there are an estimated 7.4 billion mobile phones being used by more than 5 billion people (some people use more than one phone). 43% of all mobile phones in use are smartphones [1]. Google says that number is 73% [2].
When we include all mobile phone subscriptions (not just unique users), we see there are now more active mobile phone subscriptions (7.8b) than there are people on Earth [1].
The year of mobile has come and gone. We’re in the middle of the era of mobile.
References:
