“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” said Steve Jobs at an Apple launch in 2007. Tech executives aren’t exactly shy about hyping their products, but, for once, this wasn’t an exaggeration: the iPhone’s release brought apps into common parlance and placed tiny yet powerful PCs into people’s pockets.
Not all of the consequences have been desirable. At any moment, we can disappear inside our phones, like a snail retreating into its shell, raising fears of social disconnect. This, combined with safety concerns, has led many countries to ban phones in schools, while in December 2025, Australia imposed a blanket social media ban for under 16s. And depending on a single device for so much, which is always online, has other insidious effects, says data scientist Mar Hicks at the University of Virginia. “It’s a device that has accustomed users to have far less privacy – not only in public, but wherever we are, even in our own homes.”
The smartphone clearly isn’t just a phone, says anthropologist Daniel Miller at University College London. “It’s provided an additional place within which we live,” he says. These portable digital homes can instantly transport us into the digital houses of our friends and family, too, so that we spend our lives switching between physical and digital realities, he says.
Yet we can’t ignore the broader impact of smartphones around the world. Seven in 10 people worldwide now own a smartphone, according to the GSMA, a mobile operator trade body. Smartphones are so ubiquitous that they have allowed people in many lower-income countries to bypass the desktop computer altogether. Smartphone-based fintech platforms now broker payments for 70 million users across more than 170 countries, removing the need for traditional, centralised banks. Other smartphone apps are used by farmers to monitor crops and by hospital doctors to circumvent the need for expensive machinery.
What’s more, the influence of smartphones extends far beyond the devices. Electrical components such as cameras, transistors and motion sensors were rapidly miniaturised to cram in more processing power and place new features at our fingertips. This helped kick-start several other 21st-century tech innovations: versatile drones, smart wearables, virtual-reality headsets and smaller medical implants.
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