The new mobile world order rules at home as well as on the move
The holidays are the time of year when different generations of the family gather around the dinner table. So it’s a perfect opportunity for a spot of tech anthropology.
At some point, insert into the conversation a contemporary topic about which most people have strong opinions but know relatively little. There will come a moment when someone decides that the only thing to be done to resolve the ensuing factual disputes is to “Google it”. The younger members of the group will pull out their smartphones and key in the search terms. Most of the older members will do nothing — other than make a mental note to look it up when they’re next at their PCs and wait for the smartphone owners to report what they have found.
What does this experiment demonstrate? Two things, one trivial, the other profound. The trivial one is that there is a generational gap in attitudes to networked technology. The profound one is that it no longer makes sense to talk about the “mobile internet”. For most people in the world now there is only one internet — the one they access via their mobile phones. Or, as the tech analyst Benedict Evans puts it: “Mobile is not a subset of the internet any more, which you use only if you’re waiting for a coffee or don’t have a PC in front of you — it’s becoming the main way that people use the internet”.
A 2014 Ofcom survey vividly illustrates this. It shows that mobile devices are used everywhere, not just when people are mobile. Sixty six per cent of those interviewed accessed the internet on their phones “both at home and outside”, and 16 per cent “mainly at home”. So already, for over 80 per cent of smartphone owners, their phones are probably their main channel to the internet.
This shift has long been predicted, but few people thought it would happen so quickly. The avalanche was triggered by the late Steve Jobs when he had the insight that phones were really powerful networked computers that you could hold in your hand. This led to the launch of the iPhone in 2007. In 10 years or less, most mobile phones will be smartphones and five billion people will use them as their gateway to the internet.
There are about 800 million iOS and 1.5 billion Android devices now in use. This means that Apple (which controls iOS) and Google (which controls Android, though with less of an iron grip) are now the most powerful companies in the industry, because they control the two dominant platforms. Facebook can do all the innovation it likes, but it doesn’t control the platforms on which its stuff runs, so it has to play by rules written by Apple and Google. The same goes for Amazon.
What does all this mean? First of all, the internet is finally reaching some kind of maturity — at least in the sense that it is a truly global, ubiquitous communications system — and therefore a stable foundation on which all kinds of new things can be run. Secondly, the smartphone will be the key to everything for the foreseeable future. And finally, the emerging new tech-world order is a duopoly, consisting of Apple — with its product-design flair and mastery of marketing and supply-chain management — running a high-end, incredibly profitable, tightly controlled ecosystem made up of both hardware and software; and Google, with unchallenged mastery of search, a dominant (though not total) grip on Android, and huge investments in robotics, cloud services and AI controlling the mass market. Oh — and if the term “duopoly” is new to you, why not Google it? On a smartphone.