10 years of smartphones: Turning Apple into a trillion company, pushing the camera market down and making many people “social slaves”

When the first iPhone came out in 2007, nobody thought it would replace a flip phone. When Android came out a year later, BlackBerry seemed to have a bright future.

However, the iPhone 4 in 2010 came out, with a sleek design, a front-facing camera, a high-resolution screen, and a mobile market. The smartphone officially started its era. Here are the ways smartphones marked in the past 10 years.

Connect anywhere

By the end of the decade, about 5 billion smartphones were in use globally, according to Canalys Research. The total number of Internet subscribers skyrocketed to 7.2 billion from 1.3 billion in 2010, the majority of which are mobile subscribers, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The boom is most prominent in developing countries, where mobile connectivity is more than the total population.

Technology alliance

Apple, from a niche computer company, has risen to become one of the most valuable businesses in the world thanks to the iPhone. The top five Fortune 500 tech companies are Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Together, the market value of this alliance is 4.7 trillion USD compared to 800 billion USD of the top 5 in 2010. Of course, not all of these 5 names make phones but thanks to translation services, technology related to mobile, the world economy added nearly 4 trillion USD in 2018, according to the GSM Association.

Application

Whether we book a car, order food, play a game, date, listen to music, shop … we all use the app, which didn’t exist in 2010. Most popular apps are free, but users still expect it. Spend more than $ 120 billion on them in 2019, according to analyst analysis by App Annie.

News

According to Nielsen, on average, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter message boards and other social networks take 34 minutes of every American adult every day. Fewer people are watching live television and advertisers are “sniffing” to see that. Mobile advertising spending surpassed TV for the first time in 2018 in terms of market share in the US, according to eMarketer. Thanks to smartphones, a generation of Internet influencers, fake news or cyberbullying was born.

Mobile photography

According to the Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA), sales of digital cameras fell from a peak of 121 million in 2010 to 19 million in 2018. Meanwhile, phones are equipped with four lenses and technology. state-of-the-art helps people to take much better photos. The front camera is also fully utilized. According to Google, there are 93 million selfies taken on Android devices daily.

Where am I?

Satellite positioning technology (GPS) combined with information from the base station and Wi-Fi network has made the smartphone a powerful tracking device. Google Maps and other mapping applications help people with low vision find their way in strange places.

However, for people who care about privacy, this is a disaster: phone companies and app manufacturers track users’ movements and sell data to advertisers. This business brings about 20 billion USD / year. Although the data is anonymous, many studies show completely determine who is who. Nearly 50% of companies surveyed by Verizon this year have used or plan to use smartphone management tools to track their employees.

Search

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, is ready for you to search anywhere, anytime. It is viewed 240 million times per day.

Distracted to death

In 2018, there were 2,628 serious traffic accidents in the United States alone, and of these, about 13% were related to cell phone use, according to the High Traffic Safety Commission. national speed.

Forget wallet

Apple Pay and Google Pay are not popular with most US users, but in China, people have been in the habit of not taking their wallets out for a long time. Alipay and WeChat Pay, the two largest payment apps in the country, have used more than 80% of their usage since the launch of the decade. QR codes are posted on every store. Even beggars have their own QR codes, even they refuse to accept cash but only receive money through the app.

New contact form

Messaging apps making video calls, GIFs, emojis and audio messages become more popular. In the UK, the total number of voice calls dropped from 254 billion in 2013 to 206 billion in 2018, the number of text messages decreased from 129 billion to 74 billion in the same period, according to Ofcom. Mobile data, meanwhile, has grown nine-fold from 2013 to 2018. The number of available emojis has grown to nearly 3,000 since 2010.