Google Has Yet to Crack the Smartphone Market

Source: Statista

Aside from a lot of AI talk, Google also announced two new Pixel smartphones at its I/O opening keynote early this month, the affordable Pixel 7A and the slightly less affordable Pixel Fold, which is almost four times the price of the Pixel 7A. As its name suggests, the Pixel Fold is Google’s first foldable smartphone, featuring a 7.6-inch screen when flipped open, which brings it close to the iPad mini’s 8.3-inch screen.

Having worked with various hardware makers before, Google debuted the “made by Google” Pixel smartphones in 2016. But despite good reviews and attractive price points, the company never really cracked the smartphone market, selling just a fraction of the devices market leaders Samsung, Apple and Xiaomi move year after year.

According to Statista Consumer Insights, Google remains a niche player in the smartphone market to this day, with less than five percent of smartphone users calling a Google device their main phone in most major markets.

Infographic: Google Has Yet to Crack the Smartphone Market | Statista

More Phones Than People

Source: Statista

April 3rd marks the 50th anniversary of a momentous phone call. On April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper was standing in a street of New York when he made the first ever call on a true mobile phone, calling his chief rival at Bell Labs, Joel Engel, presumably to gloat. The call, made on a prototype of what later became the Motorola DynaTAC, was brief, as Cooper later recalled. “I said ‘Joel, this is Marty. I’m calling you from a cellphone, a real, handheld, portable cellphone.’ There was a silence at the other end. I suspect he was grinding his teeth.”

Cooper’s call was a pivotal moment in the history of mobile communication, as it marked the beginning of a new era. Today, mobile phones are ubiquitous, with over 5.4 billion people worldwide having at least one mobile subscription, according to GSMA. In fact, there are now more mobile subscriptions than people on the planet, as the former overtook the latter in 2016. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), there were more than 8.58 billion mobile subscriptions in use worldwide in 2022, compared to a global population of 7.95 billion halfway through the year.