Industry Expert Blogs

Lower cost, affordable smartphones built on Arm are playing a prominent role in the thriving mobile ecosystem.

From the 1.2 billion smartphones sold in the past year, 800 million are considered to be “affordable smartphones”. These devices, which cover mid-tier to entry-level smartphones and even below, are pivotal in today’s digital world, representing the “heart and soul” of the mobile ecosystem.

Today, over 50 OEMs and ODMs produce a variety of affordable, lower cost smartphones across all markets. The application ecosystem is also growing, with more than 3.5 million applications and revenues representing a 20 percent CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate). For developers, it can be challenging to finesse their applications for every smartphone, some focus on the best hardware while others fine tune for the older “lowest common denominator” hardware. This can lead to a wide range of user experiences.

Increasing user demand

The rise of the big popular applications, like WeChat, WhatsApp, TikTok and Instagram, are playing an influential role in defining user behaviour and creating demand for the latest smartphone features.

This is pushing smartphone usage to unprecedented heights. Smartphone daily internet usage is increasing 11 minutes on average every year, surpassing PC and laptop daily internet usage. Focusing on the applications, Android users now spend about 23.7 hours per month on YouTube. TikTok has one billion active users per month (with four in five users rating TikTok as very or extremely entertaining) and about 500 million people use Instagram stories on a daily basis.

And these applications are continuing to evolve based on user demands and behaviour. For example, WeChat is far more than a chat application, with it also being used for ordering food, paying for taxis and playing games with groups of friends. The complexity is that every smartphone user expects these applications to work well on their device, even entry-level, with many of today’s smartphones already hitting their limits of performance.

Key metrics that are essential for the overall user experience, like high UI fluidity and responsiveness, quick application launch times and FPS (frames per second) stability, all need to improve. For OEMs and ODMs, it is critical that affordable smartphones deliver on these experiences, as well as broad improvements in overall performance.

Ultimately, today’s affordable smartphone customer will become tomorrow’s premium or flagship customer. A poor experience on a lower-tier smartphone device will negatively affect brand perception and therefore customer loyalty.

But how can this be achieved? How can we ensure great experiences across affordable smartphones?

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