Here’s another take on smartphone status and trends for 2020:
InternetAdvisor – Smartphone Statistics in 2020: Everything in Your Pocket
~3.5B users (of a total 0f 4.8B mobile phone users) of smartphones worldwide.
There are lots of details here, so dig in.
My thoughts:
Smartphones are no longer considered special phones, but rather perfectly normal ones. The form factor and social media and information focused paradigm of smartphones is what most users go for. Mobile phones are very much no longer just about calling and SMSing.
Even though many more Android phones are sold than iOS ditto, margins on Android phones are very low, making Apple the overall winner anyhow. Apple of course also gets a lot of revenue from media sales, that few Android providers do.
Even though smartphone sales will level out, and people seem to upgrade to the latest model less often now, even for Apple devices, there’s a huge after market. Sadly for Samsung and other Android-focused providers, they are not really in that game (only exception being Google and Sony, but they are still weak on streaming), which I consider a failure on their part, as they knew where the market was going. Also, the Android market will continue to consolidate, and the Chinese market will be even more impenetrable for foreign providers, where only Apple has any success (Samsung is almost completely gone from China already).
IoT devices are mentioned, and as Abiro is working in that area I see lots of untapped potential. The market is very much still in the experimentation stage. The biggest gain of IoT as I see it is that data is aggregated, so that it’s much easier and cheaper to collect and analyze data from many different sources (both from physical sensors and aggregated data like weather, traffic flow, maps etc). Most real innovation will be in terms of visualisation, analysis, machine learning etc.