“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he said Steve Jobs at the Apple launch in 2007. Tech executives aren’t exactly shy about promoting their products, but for once it wasn’t over the top: the release of the iPhone brought apps into common parlance and put small but powerful computers in people’s pockets.
Not all consequences were desirable. At any moment, we can disappear into our phones like a snail retreating into its shell, raising fears of social disconnection. This, combined with security concerns, has led many countries to ban phones in schools, while in December 2025 Australia introduced a blanket ban on social media for under-16s. And dependence on a single device that’s always online has other insidious effects, the data scientist says Mar Hicks at the University of Virginia. “It’s a device that has accustomed the user to much less privacy — not just in public, but wherever we are, even in our own homes.”
A smartphone is apparently not just a phone, says an anthropologist Daniel Miller at University College London. “It’s another place we live in,” he says. These portable digital homes can also instantly transport us to the digital homes of our friends and family, so we spend our lives switching between physical and digital realities, he says.
Still, we can’t ignore the wider impact of smartphones around the world. According to the GSMA, the trade body for mobile operators, seven out of 10 people worldwide now own a smartphone. Smartphones are so ubiquitous that they have allowed people in many lower-income countries to bypass desktop computers altogether. Smartphone-based fintech platforms now mediate payments for 70 million users in over 170 countries, eliminating the need for traditional centralized banks. Other smartphone apps are used by farmers to monitor crops and hospital doctors to avoid the need for expensive machines.
What’s more, the influence of smartphones extends far beyond the device itself. Electrical components such as cameras, transistors, and motion sensors were rapidly miniaturized to pack more computing power and put new functions at our fingertips. This helped usher in several other technological innovations of the 21st century: versatile drones, smart wearables, virtual reality headsets, and smaller medical implants.
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