How important is your smartphone in your life?
Do you know the feeling when you go out and realize you left your phone at home? Yeah, you know that feeling I´m talking about. The feeling like you are suddenly disconnected from the world. It feels like a part of you is almost missing and creeps in slowly but steadely no matter how hard you try to tell yourself ¨Oh it´s fine. I can go a few hours without my phone.¨Smartphones have become an inseparable part of our daily lives. We use it to set our morning alarm for work or school, to communicate with friends and family anywhere in the world on Whatsapp, listening to music on Spotify, reading News, watching YouTube videos, to check our emails, and as of course to take our daily selfies.
The smartphone has 1 billion users worldwide and a market place of over 2.5 million apps. While we could have anticipated that the iPhone would transform our ability to communicate, we could never have considered its impact for our workforce and society at large. Just 20 years ago smartphones didn't´t even exist. Now we can’t even remember the last time we actually didn’t use our smartphone for a whole day. Mobile smart devices and mobile internet are changing the way we do things and how we connect with other people. A new report published by Ericsson Consumer Lab, states that almost one-third of Americans access their favorite smartphone applications like Facebook even before getting out of the bed in the morning. According to the participants who took part in this survey conducted by the Bank of America, they couldn’t last a day without their smartphones.
A survey conducted by the Bank of America in the United States reports that 91% say that their smartphone is very important and for 60% it is even more important than their daily coffee. For 96% of Millenials (people aged 18–24) the smartphone is very important and for 93% it is definitely even more important than deodorant and for 93% more then having a toothbrush.
Smartphones both have advantages and disadvantages to our society including:
Time Saving: The ability to do so many different things on one device (from checking your email, texting friends, checking the weather and news, making appointments, make bank transcations, etc.
Safety: We are able to trace our friends and family thanks to numerous Apps such as FindMyFriends to make sure they are safe. And walking home alone late at night is no longer needed ordering taxis (Uber, Lyft, Hailo), has never been easier.
Accesible information: There is almost nothing that can´t be done with a smartphone. It basically a portable mini computer.
GPS Navigation: Smartphones allow you to find wherever you need to go at the touch of a button. No need for old fashioned paper maps like back in the day and checking your compass for east and west. You can even map out routes for your latest run schedule.
Efficiency: One of the things that make smartphones so vital to our daily lives is their efficiency. The speed with which you can do tasks on a smartphone is almost unparalleled. It allows you to get work done and communicate with people even whilst you’re on the move.
A Match.com survey released in September found that 39 percent of respondents think they dated more than they normally would because of their smartphones. Another survey was done asked how smartphones had changed their lives, the most common responses were that it brought them into closer contact with their friends and families and helped them be better informed. At least 75 percent of respondents in every country agreed that this constant connection was mostly positive.
The smartphone app industry is a booming industry that worth billions of dollars. According to entrepreneur.com the average mobile app user spends more than 30 hours a month on more than two dozen apps. That’s a lot of people spending a lot of time with their noses stuck in apps.Given that 46 percent of app users report having paid for their apps, that’s big money, too. Within this year its expected that over 268 billion app downloads will generate $77 billion worth of revenue.
At KeepCoding we teach our students how to create their dream million dollar apps. We want to help people see their creations come to life to enter this thriving market. The smartphone may have both good and bad aspects pertaining to our society today but with the knowledge on how to properly use your smarthpone the positive impact it can have on society and our daily lives is unimaginable. Interested in becoming part of the KeepCoding family with over 12,000 alumni worldwide? Come check us out!
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