The news from Apple this week that one and a half billion applications had been downloaded from the Apple app store in its first year of business (the press release is here) is just another one of those mind boggling statistics about the mobile industry that is hard to get your hear around.
So here are some more. By the end of the year, 4 billion people will be using mobile phones world-wide. That’s conservatively more than half of the world’s population. To put it into another context, about 200 million people are members of Facebook. So for every member of Facebook, there are twenty mobile users. And this does not recognise the fact that many Facebook users will be passive (I now use it about once a month). Can you imagine checking your mobile once a month?
This is why I doubt we have even seen half of the impact that mobile will have yet. Whilst doing some research into mobile payments and ticketing I can across some interesting data. Apparently we check the whereabouts of our mobile phone far more regularly than we do for our wallet. My personal experience would also suggest this is the case. This presents a strong argument that using the phone as a “virtual wallet” might, in fact, be more secure than using a real wallet.
Perhaps most interesting will be the impact on society that a fully mobile literate population will have. As part of my job I get to see some of the content that young people are creating and sharing through mobile. It is extraordinary.
As a fully mobile literate generation grows up, the role of educating, training and entertaining them will fall to those of us that have not immersed ourselves in mobile technology to the same extent – and this will mean revisiting so many of the things we take for granted: like how we teach, how we learn, how we communicate, how we pay.
The impact of mobile will be so much more than the big numbers.
2 comments:
Note quite 1.5bn applications. 1.5bn downloads. So that's every time there's an update to an app you've installed - some of mine seem to get updated every week. Interesting to divide the number of downloads by the number of iPhone and iPod touch devices sold.
Good point Mark. And where was it that I read that the average free app lasts around 5 days before it is binned...?
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