Industry trends In developed economies in the mid 2000s to early 2010s, fashion and brand loyalty drove sales, as markets had matured and people moved to their second and third phones. In the United States, technological innovation with regard to expanded functionality was a secondary consideration, as phone designs there centred on miniaturisation. Existing feature phone
operating systems at the time were not designed to handle additional tasks beyond communication and basic functions, and due to the complex bureaucracy and other factors, they never developed a thriving software ecosystem. These platforms also eclipsed the popularity of smartphone platforms historically aimed towards enterprise markets, such as BlackBerry. There has been an industry shift from feature phones (including low-end smartphones), which rely mainly on volume sales, to high-end flagship smartphones, which also enjoy higher margins, thus manufacturers find high-end smartphones much more lucrative than feature phones. The shift away from feature phones has forced
mobile network operators to increase
subsidies of handsets, and the high selling-prices of flagship smartphones have had a negative effect on the mobile network operators, who have seen their
earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) margins drop as they sold more smartphones and fewer feature phones. To help make up for this, carriers typically use high-end devices to
upsell customers onto higher-priced service plans with increased data allotments. Trends have shown that consumers are willing to pay more for smartphones that include newer features and technology, and that smartphones were considered to be more relevant in present-day
popular culture than feature phones.
Market share During the mid-2000s, best-selling feature phones such as the fashionable flip-phone
Motorola Razr V3, multimedia
Sony Ericsson W580i, and the
LG Black Label Series not only occupied the mid-range pricing in a wireless provider's range, they made up the bulk of retail sales as smartphones from
BlackBerry and
Palm were still considered a niche category for business use. Even as late as 2009, smartphone penetration in North America was low. In 2011, feature phones accounted for 60 percent of the mobile telephones in the
United States, and 70 percent of mobile phones sold worldwide. According to
Gartner in Q2 2013, 225 million smartphones were sold worldwide which represented a 46.5 percent gain over the same period in 2012, while 210 million feature phones were sold, which was a decrease of 21 percent year over year, the first time that smartphones have outsold feature phones. Smartphones accounted for 51.8 percent of mobile phone sales in the second quarter of 2013, resulting in smartphone sales surpassing feature phone sales for the first time. A survey of 4,001 Canadians by
Media Technology Monitor (MTM) in late 2012 suggested about 83 percent of the anglophone population owned a cellphone, up from 80 percent in 2011 and 74 percent in 2010. About two thirds of the mobile phone owners polled said they had a smartphone, and the other third had feature phones or non-smartphones. According to MTM, non-smartphone users are more likely to be female, older, have a lower income, live in a small community, and have less education. The survey found that smartphone owners tend to be male, younger, live in a high-income household with children in the home, and residents of a community of one million or more people. Students also ranked high among smartphone owners.
Japan Mobile phones in Japan diverged from those used elsewhere, with carriers and devices often implementing advanced features – such as
NTT DoCoMo's
i-mode platform for mobile internet in 1999,
mobile payments,
mobile television, and
near field communications – that were not yet widely used, or even adopted, outside of Japan. This divergence has been cited as an example of
Galápagos syndrome; as a result, these feature phones are retroactively referred to as a , blending with . Throughout the 2010s, gala-phones continued to see usage, with users citing preferences for the devices and their durability over smartphones. However, according to a study by the NTT Docomo Mobile Society Research Institute, as of April 2025, the majority (98.0%) of mobile phone users in Japan now own smartphones, with the most common reason for the switch being described as battery aging.
Mobile games oriented towards smartphones have seen significant growth and revenue in Japan, even though there were three times fewer smartphone users in the country than in the United States as of 2017. ==Platforms==