14 Cellphone Usage Statistics

Technology has bought innovation that we could thank for. Out of all the technological advancements we use everyday, mobile phones are one of the leading or sought-after gadgets people are dying to have.

With every design upgrade or new unit, some people are quick to buy the latest mobile phone trends.

Because of the expected $2.92 trillion in mobile commerce sales by 2020, online retailers can no longer ignore the importance of having a mobile-optimized website to attract customers and grow their business.

There are currently 6.4 billion smartphone users in the world. The average American smartphone user spends 2 hours and 55 minutes a day on their device.  At least 97% of American adults now have a cell phone.

Pew Research Center’s first survey of smartphone ownership in 2011 found that only 35% of Americans had cell phones; now, it has fluctuated to 85%.

The first step is to learn how modern consumers interact with their mobile devices. When making changes to your store, you’ll need up-to-date information to help you make the best decisions possible.

We’ll give you key cellphone usage statistics in this article, including the number of people who own smartphones, the amount of money spent on digital ads on mobile devices, and more.

15 Statistics On Cellphone Usage

Having a smartphone has made mundane things or events exciting for most of us, and we can’t imagine life without it. It’s hard to believe that we ever lived without them.

97% of Americans now have some sort of cell phone and according to Pew Research Center’s first survey of smartphone ownership in 2011 found that just 35 percent of Americans owned a smartphone.

Instead of being largely reliant on a desktop or laptop computer when the internet was first introduced in the early 2000s, today’s users are increasingly able to access digital information while “on the go.” Take a look at how cell phone usage statistics have evolved through the years.

How Many People Use Mobile Phones?

According to Statista, by 2021, there’s 6.4 billion smartphone users worldwide. Given the world’s population of 7.9 billion people, this translates to a smartphone penetration rate of more than 80%.

The number of smartphone users is also rapidly increasing over time, as evidenced by the fact that there were only 3.7 billion smartphone users just five years ago in 2016.

In other words, in just half a decade, the number of smartphone users has increased by 73.9 percent.

Smartphone adoption is expected to continue to rise in the coming years, surpassing seven billion users in 2024 and rising to 7.5 billion by 2026.

China, as the world’s most populous country, should come as no surprise to the majority of these smartphone users.

There are over 911 million smartphone users in China, which is more than double the number in India, which is in second place. The United States, with 270 million smartphone users, is the third-largest smartphone market.

Who Has A Smartphone Or A Cell Phone?

Across a wide range of demographic groups, the majority of Americans own a cellphone. Smartphone ownership, on the other hand, shows greater variation based on factors such as age, household income, and level of education.

	Cellphone	Smartphone	Cellphone, but not smartphone
Gender
Men	97%	85%	11%
Women	98%	85%	12%
Age
18-29	100%	96%	4%
30-49	100%	95%	5%
50-64	97%	83%	12%
65+	92%	61%	29%
Ethnicity
White	97%	85%	11%
Black	99%	83%	15%
Hispanic	100%	85%	14%
Education Level
High school or less	96%	75%	19%
Some college	98%	89%	9%
College graduate	98%	93%	5%
Income
Less than $30,000	97%	76%	19%
$30,000-$49,999	97%	83%	14%
$50,000-$74,999	97%	85%	12%
$75,000+	100%	96%	3%
Areas
Urban	98%	89%	9%
Suburban	97%	84%	12%
Rural	94%	80%	14%

How Often Do People Check Their Phones?

New data shows that Americans check their phones an average of 96 times a day. According to Asurion, a global tech support company, this happens once every 10 minutes.

According to the company, this is a 20% increase over a similar survey conducted two years ago. According to Asurion, about half of all Americans are making an effort to reduce the amount of time they spend on their phones.

Time Spent on Mobile Phones

Now that we know how many people own smartphones, the next step is to figure out how much time they spend using them.

The average American adult spent 3 hours and 43 minutes per day on their mobile devices in 2019. That was the first time that the amount of time spent on mobile devices surpassed the amount of time spent watching television, which was 3 hours and 35 minutes.

Over the next two years, the gap is expected to widen even more, with time spent on mobile devices expected to reach just under four hours (3 hours and 54 minutes) in 2021, compared to 3 hours and 22 minutes for television.

According to eMarketer, 2019, US adults spent an average of 2 hours and 55 minutes per day on their smartphones in 2019, which is nine minutes more than the previous year.

Mobile Phone Addiction

According to the survey, nearly nine out of ten Americans are offended whenever anyone they’re talking to looks at their phone. Surprisingly, 75% of survey respondents admit to doing it themselves. Nearly one-fifth of those polled say they do it regularly.

There are ways to help you pay attention to your phone usage and even reduce it. Smartphones, including iPhones, have a “screen time” feature that tracks how much time you spend on your phone.

According to a Washington Post article, people should not check their emails first thing in the morning and should set boundaries for when and where they check their phones.

According to the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is a catalog of officially recognized mental disorders, smartphone addiction is not a diagnosable condition.

Dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for the brain’s reward and pleasure zones, is released when you use your smartphone, according to research. It’s the same chemical released when you eat and when you play video games.

Determining whether you have developed an unhealthy dependence on your smartphone, depends on you and your loved ones’ feelings.

Phones Are Being Used  To Conduct Product Research

As the world becomes more digital, information has become more widely and easily accessible online, and consumer habits have changed as a result.

According to the most recent mobile usage statistics, nearly seven out of ten internet users in the United States say they would look for customer reviews on their phones while in a store before approaching a salesperson.

In-store mobile users aren’t just looking up product reviews. They’re also looking for other products that are similar to the ones they’re thinking about buying, with 58% looking up product specifications.

Figures like these show how important it is for retailers to make sure their customers have a good mobile experience. Half of them have already put it on their list of most important customer initiatives.

Mobile Shopping

People are using their mobile devices for more than just product research; many are also using them to make purchases. According to the most recent mobile statistics, there is a high reliance on online shopping on mobile devices, especially through apps.

More than half of internet users (55.4%) use their mobile phones to make online purchases, and seven out of ten (69.4%) say they use shopping apps on their mobile devices – whether it’s a phone or a tablet.

Females aged 16 to 24 are the most likely to shop on their mobile devices, with 63 percent having purchased a product online with their mobile devices in the previous month.

Males aged 25 to 34, on the other hand, are the most likely to engage in mobile commerce (58.1%). In contrast, only 35.8% of male internet users aged 55 to 64 have done so.

With so many people shopping on their phones, you should prioritize your mobile optimization strategy as an e-commerce business owner.

This is especially true because users who have had a bad experience on a mobile website are much less likely to buy from that company again in the future.

Mobile Data Service

Mobile devices accounted for less than a third of all web traffic (31.16 percent) at the start of 2015. Fast forward to the beginning of 2021, and that percentage has risen to 54.8 percent, a 75.9% increase.

Since the third quarter of this year, mobile traffic has consistently accounted for more than half of all global website traffic.

Users can expect mobile traffic to continue to grow as 5G technology becomes available, which will bring much faster internet speeds and connections. Experts predict that by 2026, average smartphone data usage will have risen from 10GB (2020) to 35GB.

Digital Media Consumption on Mobile Phones

We can deduce from the above mobile usage statistics that many consumers spend a significant amount of their internet time on mobile devices. We’ll break down the different ways they consume digital media in this statistic.

Smartphones now account for 70% of all digital media time in the United States (Comscore, 2019). This is up 22.8 percent from the 57 percent reported in 2017.

There is a significant difference between time spent on the mobile web and time spent on apps when it comes to the total time spent consuming digital media on smartphones.

While the latter has remained unchanged at 7% since 2017, US consumers now spend 63 percent of their time on digital media via smartphone apps, up from 50% in 2017.

Smartphones are the most popular devices for internet users to consume digital media, as evidenced by these mobile statistics. Only 23% of time spent with digital media by US consumers is spent on a desktop computer, and only 7% is spent on a tablet computer.

194 Billion Mobile Phone Apps Were Downloaded In 2019

In 2017, around 178 billion apps were downloaded, according to Statista. People are expected to download 258 billion apps in 2022, according to future smartphone usage statistics.

This hypothesis is bolstered by the fact that 76% of millennials believe their smartphones are useless if they don’t have any apps installed.

Millennials, in general, are the world’s largest app users, with 74% finding comfort in using apps when bored or with nothing else to do.

98% Of Generation Z Own A Smartphone

According to the most recent smartphone usage trends, Generation Z (people born between the mid-90s and early 2000s) is the demographic with the most smartphones. Around 52% of them say their phones are their most valuable possessions.

92 percent of Generation X (people born between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s) own a cell phone, but they still place a higher value on their desktop computers.

Smartphone usage has increased among baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964). In 2013, only 18% had a smartphone, compared to 42% today.

In 2016, The United States Became A wireless-only Nation

The number of wireless connections surpassed the number of landline connections sometime in mid-2016, according to the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which published mobile phone usage statistics.

After passing the halfway point in 2016, it began to steadily rise to 52.2 percent in 2017. In the United States, around 75% of people aged 25 to 34 live in wireless-only households. The South has the most wireless users, with 57.1 percent of households going completely wireless.

Owning A Smartphone Is Still A Problem In Developing Countries

In today’s world, approximately 5 billion people own a mobile phone, with roughly half of those using smartphones. The majority of those people, however, are from developed countries.

According to 2018 smartphone ownership statistics, many people in developing countries still do not have access to a smartphone or any other mobile device for that matter.

In India, for example, 35% of people do not own a mobile device, while 40% own a mobile phone but not a smartphone.

Other developing countries with large populations, such as Nigeria. 17 percent of people of the country have phones while 44 percent own a mobile phone other than a smartphone.

Smartphone Sales Stopped Growing For The First Time In 2018

Smartphone sales stopped growing for the first time in 2018, according to Counterpoint Research and Strategy Analytics’ cell phone statistics.

This is the first time since the invention of smartphones that there has been a year-over-year decline. Before that, Apple’s phone sales had increased by 20% since 2012.

Despite this, the total number of devices sold in 2018 reached 1.43 billion. However, these figures represent a 5% decrease from the 1.51 billion units sold the previous year.

Further research indicates that Apple sold 206.3 million devices in 2018, compared to 215.8 million in 2017.

Samsung sold 291.3 million units in 2018, a decrease from 317.5 million in 2017. However, according to additional smartphone statistics, Huawei and Xiaomi were the only phone manufacturers to see sales rise in 2018.

Conclusion

With so many people owning smartphones and this number expected to grow, it is safe to say that investing in the mobile phone industry will be one of the most profitable. Mobile phones are arguably the world’s most important technology.

Cellphones, smartphones, or any handheld device will likely continue to dominate our society, and phone usage will likely increase. Statistics on smartphone usage show our society’s and industry’s future.