Size Matters for Connected Devices. Phablets Don't.
Flurry now detects about 1 billion smartphones and tablets in use around the world every month. In the last 30 days, we saw activity on more than 2,000 unique device models. As the device base grows, we're seeing an increasing variety …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after comScore measured smartphones and tablets at just under 7 percent of total U.S. digital traffic, Flurry's April 2013 report marks the moment the installed base stops being an emerging category: roughly 1 billion devices active per month, spread across more than 2,000 distinct models. The pickup was unusually broad — Electronista, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, PandoDaily and others all ran the story within days.
The report's sharper claim is about shape, not scale: despite the buzz around larger phones, Flurry finds phablets barely register in actual usage. That puts hard measurement data against the industry narrative that big-screen devices were the next growth engine.
First-order effects
- App developers and advertisers now have to plan against a fragmented base of 2,000+ active device models, making per-device testing and analytics a genuine cost line rather than an afterthought.
- Device makers betting on larger screens face usage data showing phablets are a negligible slice of activity, weakening the case that screen size alone drives engagement.
Second-order effects
- Measurement firms like Flurry gain leverage as the de facto census-takers of the device market — their segmentation of the billion-device base becomes the reference point for ad targeting and product roadmaps.
- Fragmentation across thousands of models raises the value of cross-platform development tooling and abstraction layers, since few teams can optimize natively for every form factor.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, competitive advantage in mobile shifts from any single flagship device toward whoever can measure and segment usage across the whole base — hardware design increasingly validated by behavioral data rather than launch-cycle hype.
- Form-factor debates like the phablet question get settled by usage analytics rather than press narratives, institutionalizing third-party measurement as part of how the industry decides what to build next.
The trend: Mobile measurement firms are becoming the industry's census bureau, shifting the conversation from raw adoption counts toward how device variety and form factor actually shape usage.