How Many People Have Smartphones in 2023?
Given the growth of mobile commerce, it’s become increasingly important for ecommerce business owners to focus their efforts on mobile marketing. In order to understand how many people have smartphones, let’s look at the latest smartphone users statistics.
How many people have smartphones in 2023?
The latest figures show an increasing number of smartphone users year after year. In 2023, the number of global smartphone users is estimated at 6.8 billion, marking a 4.2% annual increase.
It is also 3.2 billion, or 86.5%, more than the number of smartphone users there were in 2016, just seven years ago.
In fact, from 2016 to 2023, the total number of global smartphone users grew at an average of 9.5% annually, with the biggest growth coming in 2017. That year, the number of smartphone users grew by 20.9%.
Smartphones are also the most popular electronic devices. The latest smartphone users statistics show that of all the devices being used today, smartphones are the most popular, used by 95.8% of all internet users.
Reports estimate that the number of global smartphone users will continue to increase and hit 7.1 billion by 2024.
Given an expected global population of over 8 billion by then, that means that the smartphone penetration rate in 2023 will be around 89%. In other words, nearly nine in 10 people in the world will be equipped with a smartphone.
Number of smartphone users in advanced and emerging economies
The number of smartphone users is rather disproportionate in its distribution across different economies. As expected, smartphone ownership is significantly higher across advanced economies including most European countries and the US.
The latest statistics on global smartphone users show that the penetration rate of these devices is the highest in the US—as many as 82.2% of the population there owns a smartphone.
This is followed by the United Kingdom, with 79.8%, and France and Germany, with 78.8% each. Italy rounds out the five countries with the highest smartphone penetration rates at 77%.
In emerging economies, however, smartphone usage drops significantly. For instance, just 55.4% of Brazil’s population owns a smartphone. This number falls to 35.4% in India. In Nigeria, fewer than one in five people (19.7%) are smartphone users. One of the biggest contributing factors to the low smartphone usage in emerging economies is their high rates of poverty, which renders the device unaffordable to many.