In recent years, smartphones have become an indispensable device for the vast majority of the world’s population. They are practically an extension of our body.
The smartphone was born in the 1990s, two decades after Martin Cooper’s mobile phone.
Smartphone usage levels have reached such heights that smartphones are now practically used interchangeably with mobiles. In fact, 82% of the world’s mobile devices in 2024 are smartphones, 6.97 billion to be precise.
How many people in the world have a smartphone?
According to the Digital 2024 study, 97.6 percent of the world’s population will have a smartphone in 2024 – 1.8 percent more than in the previous year. In contrast, 6.9 percent of the world’s population as a whole had a basic mobile phone, a 12.7 percent decrease compared to 2023.
Internet access via mobile phones
A relevant figure for measuring the impact of mobile phones in general and smartphones in particular on our daily lives is Internet access. Of the 5,350 million users of the Internet worldwide, 96.5% access the Internet via a mobile phone, a number that has increased by 4.6% since the previous year.
Broken down by type of phone, 94.6% do so from a smartphone (4% more than in 2023) while only 3.8% do so from a basic phone (down 26.9% from 2023).
To observe the growing importance of mobile access to the Internet, there is one striking statistic: while in the third quarter of 2013, 27.3% of the world’s total time spent on the Internet was from a mobile phone (and 72.7% from a computer), ten years later the numbers had reversed: 57.6% of time spent on the Internet came from mobiles compared to 42.4% from computers.
A percentage of Internet consumption from mobile phones which, if we analyse it by country, shows that the six countries with the highest percentage of time spent on the Internet are Asian, specifically China and Thailand (63.3%), Indonesia (62.2%), Saudi Arabia (61.4%), India (60.1%) and the Philippines (60.1%).
Internet access from mobile phones by age
If we break down Internet access from mobile devices by age, we see that there are few differences, although it is slightly higher as age decreases.
Thus, 97.2% of women aged between 16 and 34 use mobile phones to access the Internet, compared with 95.7% of women in the oldest age group analysed (55 to 64).
Among men, 96.3% of those aged between 16 and 34 use mobile phones to access the Internet, compared with 94.6% of those aged between 55 and 64.
Mobile phones to play video games
Since video games were born in the mid-20th century, their evolution has been enormous, as has the way they are played. So much so that 67.7% of Internet users between 16 and 64 years of age will use mobile phones in 2024 precisely for playing video games, an increase of 2.3% compared to the previous year.
Time and data consumption on smartphones
According to data from the same report we have been talking about, the average daily use of smartphones will be 5 hours and one minute a day in 2024, which represents an increase of 5.6% over the previous year: 16 minutes.
By type of application, 34% of that time is spent on social networking apps, 31.4% on entertainment, 14.4% on utility and productivity apps (including browsers and/or search engines), 11.1% on video games, 1.5% on shopping and the remaining 6.8% on others.
If we analyse the data consumed in these different uses, we find that the monthly consumption per smartphone is 21.13 GB, an increase of 30% compared to the previous year.
Broken down by type of application, 72.7% of this consumption is in video applications, 8.6% in social networks, 3.1% in software updates, 2% in browsers, 1.4% in audio applications, 0.5% in file sharing and 11.7% in other types of applications.
