In 2020, 80 Percent Of People In The World Will Have A Smartphone

I have read Tune’s “Global Mobile 2016” report which covers 249 different countries, autonomous regions, and other geographic areas of the planet.

Its main conclusions are as follows:

• In 2015, 800 million people worldwide bought their first smartphones.
• This year, they should be 600 million to do so, taking the global smartphone penetration rate over 50% for the first time.
• In 2020, 6.6 billion people – or 80 percent of the world’s population (!) – will own a smartphone (see the graph below).

• In 2015, developers added 400,000 new mobile applications on Google Play and the iOS app store. Mobile Internet users downloaded 180 billion applications – 50 billion more than during the previous year.
• The number of downloaded applications – on average 55 applications per smartphone user – has plateaued since 2013 in developed countries. But it has more than doubled in 2015 in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China).
• 12 applications have over a billion installs. They are all owned by Facebook or Google (!): Facebook, Gmail, Google Books, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Google Maps, Google+, Google Search, Google Text-To-Speech, Messenger, WhatsApp and YouTube. But it should be noted that several of these Google applications are force-installed on Android smartphones.

I often explain that digital is not a sector: Corporations, instead of implementing a “digital agenda,” should adapt their overall strategy to the digital world.

It is now the same for mobile.