Mobile Phones Dominate Tablet Sales, Here’s a Graph to Prove It

“The future is phones” – in this article we’ll go over some of the mobile device market changes including the rise of smart phones, app installations and the apparent demise of the tablet.

Smart phone sales and usage continue to rise year on year, with 2017 expecting to see a 70% penetration of mobiles into the population. On the flip side, Tablet sales are slowing down, represented majorly by the iPad suffering with a bleak outlook on continuation.

As the mobile market moves more towards larger screen models (iPhone 6 Plus, Galaxy Note), we’re seeing less users adopt a larger screen tablet device – citing their mobile phone as reasonable for all activities. We covered a very similar story recently where we talked about iPad Mini sales plummeting and people wondering if small tablets, or tablets at all, still have a place in our market.

Tablets certainly still have a place in the professional field, with many schools across the world implementing iPad programs for Primary school students. In the island state of Tasmania, Australia many primary schools there have adopted a one-iPad-to-three students model within grades one to three classes and furthering this to a one-to-one iPad scheme for students in grades four, five and six.

This graph explains what the smart phone vs tablet distribution has been as of late. As you can see, after Q1 2014 there has been a steady and sharp decline in ratings. Apple iPad sales are said to make up a major part of these sales globally, still unable to use their fan-boys to carry them through to a sales growth year-on-year.

As we explained above, smart phone screen sizing is something that has seen improvements over recent technology releases. Compare Samsung’s Galaxy S3 with their S5 or Apples iPhone 4 with the iPhone 6 Plus to get a simple view on the topic. Localytics have put all of this information into another handy graph for us.

Finally, we’ll show you some proof that people are using their applications much more than seen previously. “Time in App” has seen an increase across the board, with some of the most popular applications being music, games and photography related.

We’ll continue to report on the tablet market decline as it develops. But to now let us leave you with a question – who will be the first to fold? Will Samsung or Apple ‘call it quits’ first, or will it be some smaller players?

Images courtesy of Chiphell