Mobile is eating the world, 2016 edition: how ~2.5B smartphones and mobile computing with AI, dominated by “GAFA”, reshape retail, cars, and everything else
As we pass 2.5bn smartphones on earth and head towards 5bn, and mobile moves from creation to deployment, the questions change.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece sits mid-arc in Benedict Evans' running account of mobile: his 16 mobile theses laid out the transformation drivers in late 2015, and he had already argued that mobile isn't about screen size but about ease-of-use, security, power consumption, and ecosystem scale. The 2016 update marks the halfway point — roughly 2.5 billion smartphones installed, heading toward 5 billion.
The framing matters because it changes what the industry measures: with the installed base still growing (Cisco projected mobile-driven traffic passing a zettabyte that year), the interesting questions move from who buys a phone to what a deployed, AI-capable, GAFA-dominated device fleet does to retail, cars, and other industries.
First-order effects
- GAFA's control of mobile operating systems and app distribution makes them the default gatekeepers for any company — retailers, automakers, banks — that wants to reach consumers through the smartphone.
Second-order effects
- Industries outside tech are forced to rebuild around the smartphone as their primary interface, while network operators and infrastructure vendors absorb the traffic growth Cisco tied to mobile's expansion.
Third-order effects
- As the base approaches saturation — the ~4B adults with smartphones by 2019 confirmed this trajectory — industry analysis shifts from adoption curves to usage patterns and emerging tech, setting up the 2020s questions about a fully connected world.
The trend: Mobile computing is shifting from an adoption race to a deployment phase, in which GAFA's AI-capable platforms become the substrate other industries must build on.