“Mobile-first” is not a fad or a choice. It’s how you build consumer software in 2016.

From Benedict Evans’ recent Platform wars: the final score…

“These numbers illustrate the fundamental change in scale that the shift to mobile represents for the tech industry. Annual smartphone sales will rise to close to 2bn units and PC sales fall to close to 200m, while the smartphone install base will rise from 2.5bn to close to 5bn and the PC install base fall from today’s 1.5bn to closer to 1bn (if that). So mobile has 10x the unit volume and 5x the install base — ‘a billion is the new million’. This is why all the industry investment is shifting to the ARM/iOS/Android ecosystem from the WinTel ecosystem.” (Emphasis mine.)

Ten times the annual sales. Five times as many users.

This is why building your company’s digital experience around mobile (and adapting to desktop afterward) makes sense. Of course these ratios will change for the user base of your specific product or service. But it’s a dead-beaten fact now, even for many nerdy “power users” like myself:

People use smartphones as their primary computer.

It’s past time to start building websites and applications that reflect this — not just in appearance, but in usability testing, navigation, network usage, load times… the whole experience of working with your company through a mobile phone.

Right now, and likely for many years to come, a mobile experience is the experience people have with you. Make it a great one.