Benedict Evans, a leading mobile expert and Venture Capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz, recently published data around how people are accessing internet.
Today, there are well over 2 billion smartphones in use, and there are between 3.5 and 4.5bn people with a mobile phone of some kind, out of only a little over 5bn adults on earth. Over the next few years almost all of the people who don’t yet have a phone will get one, and almost all of the phones on earth will become smartphones. Source: ben-evans.com
What does this mean? Besides the obvious and astonishing fact that everyone on earth will eventually have a smart phone, it means that we have reached the tipping point where mobile devices have overtaken desktops and laptops as the primary device people use to access the internet. See the chart below by John Gruber for a visual:
Red e App’s Chief Product Officer, Patrick Goodman, commented “What is great about these stats is not the platform – Android or iPhone, Chrome or Firefox – it’s that the world revolves around mobile to use the internet, and at its core, using the internet is communicating. The post-desktop world is here, and everything begins to orbit around the mobile device.”
“Think of your mobile device as the sun, and the internet as gravity. The first planet orbiting is apps you use every day, the second planet orbiting are apps you use for work, the third planet is apps you connect to smart devices like your thermostat with, and so on. Your daily life revolves around your mobile device.”
The majority of people are now accessing information from their mobile devices, and employers have to think about how they provide information to employees.
If you want employees to see your communications, meet them where they are … on their phones.
