Where To Find Your Future Customers/Users

Our portfolio company Flurry is the leading provider of mobile analytics. They have analytics installed in over 140,000 mobile apps running worldwide. Through this global reach, they have a lot of data on how many iOS and Android devices are in operation throughout the world.

They wrote a blog post yesterday laying out this data and some analysis they did on it and this graph jumped out at me.

RemainingTAM_Devices_Last 30 Days-resized-600

These are the numbers of future potential users of mobile apps worldwide based on total market size, ability to afford smartphones, and the current penetration of each market.

Beyond the US, mobile developers should focus on the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) plus Japan and then western europe.

And if you believe that mobile will be the dominant platform for all web/internet activity going forward (as Marc Andreessen hints at in this interview), then web developers may want to focus on these markets as well.

#mobile#Web/Tech

Comments (Archived):

  1. gregorylent

    the deepest truth about where you find your customers is, within your awareness, accessed via intention, surrender, belief, and desire,  …. it’s kind of like what the bible says, it is my father’s pleasure to give you the kingdom .. ask, and ye shall receivethat’s the mystic component, anyway .. after that, it’s just action

    1. ShanaC

      Appropriate, considering the day…

    2. Rohan

      Exactly.Search our feelings, we must! 

  2. jason wright

    “Holland” – they shouldn’t use that to describe The Netherlands. It’s like saying “California” for the US.

    1. fredwilson

      Good point

      1. jason wright

        To be fair though they are using “Netherlands” in another of their charts. 

        1. Peter Farago

          here’s the official site of the holland ;)http://www.holland.com/us/T…

    2. Albert Hartman

      Huh? California is only part of the US (49 other states, Puerto Rico, WashDC, some pacific islands). Beyond Holland – what does the Netherlands include to you?

      1. jason wright

        Friesland? That’s where the Friesian language comes from, the closest living language to English.The Netherlands is divided into 12 provinces. Holland is divided into North Holland and South Holland provinces. That leaves 10 other provinces. Friesland is one of those 10.I have a friend in Groningen. She corrects me when I say “Holland” for The Netherlands.

    3. Aaron Klein

      True.Reminds me of that old movie “My Fellow Americans”…”Good heavens, the Vice President just referred to the ‘nether regions’ again.”

    4. Peter Farago

      “There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.”  Jokes aside, Holland is a shorter word and fit better into the legend under the chart.  That’s really all there was to it.  And, I read that the Netherlands sometimes referred to as Holland (honestly, before I posted the story).

  3. Aaron Klein

    There is no doubt that “more computing than we think” will be shifting to mobile.There are still use cases that people prefer to do with a large screen but more and more of it is shifting and any web app without a mobile strategy is in danger of losing mindshare, at the very least.Great chart…emerging markets are fascinating. I personally can’t wait to see how Android handsets play a role in transforming Africa.

  4. Nic

    You should also include African countries such as Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa as countries to watch, build for and focus on.I run a mobile startup in Cape Town, South Africa and can tell you that the market is booming in Africa and has massive growth potential. 

    1. jason wright

      Yes, the population of Nigeria is huge, and if as a country it can learn to better manage and control its oil wealth it could be a Brazil in the making. The other big problem is the religious divide.

    2. fredwilson

      I guess the reason those countries don’t show high on the chart is relatively small middle class populations. Do you see that changing quickly?

      1. DanielHorowitz

        Change will certainly not be as quick if people follow this advice and invest elsewhere. If people choose to invest their time and money in Africa positive change will accelerate. 

    3. Peter Farago

      of those countries, South Africa ranked the highest as having the 42nd most iOS and Android devices using an app over the last 30 days.   There still remains a lot of income inequality, unemployment, etc. in South Africa.  The addressable audience is relatively small.

  5. jason wright

    Does “mobile” include tablets or only smart phones? 

  6. Elia Freedman

    Flurry has continued to put out interesting data. Another one worth following is Horace Dediu. If you are not following him, you should be:http://www.asymco.com

  7. kidmercury

    game over for the US. china and USA are undergoing a role reversal; china is becoming more economically free, USA is becoming more and more enslaved by debt. china is becoming more of a financial epicenter; the jobs will eventually come to the US, provided the education system can get some type of reform. there is also the issue that a bunch of minerals used to make computing devices are becoming increasingly scarce and china is already positioned to own them, and use their scarcity as a military/economic advantage. the more BFFs you have in china and in chinese state-owned enterprises, the better off you’ll be IMHO. #fs 

    1. fredwilson

      i agree with this premise but wonder if you can be economically free without being politically free

  8. Yalim K. Gerger

    Another list created by a western company that does not include Turkey. It is such a common mistake that companies blissfully ignore Turkey in their analysis, I am not even surprised anymore. I am guessing that Turkey would have had a place in this list somewhere around Mexico.

    1. Chris Hill

      If not higher. I agree that it seems odd that Turkey isn’t in here. With a population of 72 million and a rising middle class it should fit in here. It’s worth going to their blog explanation because the additional graphs there show the % of potential pentration that these numbers mean. Certainly Turkey with a larger population and low penetration makes more sense to focus on than say South Korea where the penetration is at the upper end. As much as the emerging markets are big opportunities, the data suggests there is still a lot of growth in the US to be had.

      1. Yalim K. Gerger

        Amazon, Ebay, Kleiner are all investors in Turkey. I wonder when Fred is going to show some interest to our country.

        1. fredwilson

          we have found that anything farther than 6-8 hours flight is too far for our kind of investing. i think turkey is incredibly interesting. but like india, china, israel, australia, turkey is too far for us to invest there

          1. Yalim K. Gerger

            I don’t think I can influence your investment strategy over a disqus comment. This takes time and effort. For the future I am optimistic though because New York-Istanbul flight is not that longer than the New York-Berlin flight.The business hours match also perfectly. I know this because I’ve been doing business with East Coast based companies for years. The time difference is 7 hours. So when the business starts in New York, it is about 15:30 in Istanbul. And I know you get up early. :-)To be honest, I don’t know if there are more than a few startups here, if any, that you would be interested right now. We are at an earlier state in our Web ecosystem development. Still, this does not mean that you cannot come over and have a meetup or a panel or whatever with the startup community here when your schedule permits. You’d find out about the latest developments in the region, connect with the entrepreneurs and we’d have the opportunity to learn from one of the best.I promise, the experience will be worth every minute of your time.

          2. fredwilson

            I plan to be in turkey in the next year or two for sure.

          3. Yalim K. Gerger

            Great to hear that you are planning to visit! If you ever want to execute this plan, I’d be happy to help any way I can. 🙂

    2. Peter Farago

      i love the pride!  Turkey finished in the top 27th in our report, based on the size of the active installed base (iOS and Android devices using an app over the last 30 days).  Despite the country having a series of financial crises over the last decade, it is a G20 country and boasts the 16th largest GDP in the world.

      1. Yalim K. Gerger

        Peter,Do you mean to say that in the chart above Turkey was 27th? So less than a million addressable users? If that is the case, nothing could be further away from the truth.Speaking of the crisis, Turkey had only one financial crisis about a decade ago. The global crisis of 2008 had a relatively small impact, nothing more than what could not be avoided. This was because the country learned its lessons very well from its own crisis in 2000-2001.The economy is quite stable. Our young generation is reasonably well educated and it’s getting better everyday. The job market is excellent. Real estate is healthy but not bubbling. The startup ecosystem is emerging. The euorpean debt crisis only makes us laugh (we would surely feel some pain if they melt down though. We live on the same planet after all. But to a much lesser degree than others.). I have really not seen this country in a better position in my life time.

        1. Peter Farago

          yeah, 27th. but that’s pretty good. it’s not far behind Israel, and ahead of Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, South Africa, and other developed economies. 

          1. Yalim K. Gerger

            I don’t know…Like I said the numbers for Turkey don’t make sense to me. Even if we assume that they are correct, did you know that the Turkish Government is in the process of buying 20 million tablets and distribute them to the children going to school? I am sure you can appreciate the game changing effects of this event. Virtually every kid will have a Tablet Computer. Virtually every household will have a Tablet Computer. Our education system will use the Tablet extensively.This is not a dream or a vision. It is very much happening right now. The pilot is about the start.I guess this should move Turkey up a little in the next couple of years.

  9. jason wright

    Japan’s numbers surprise me. I wonder why penetration to this point in time is so relatively low?Looking at Facebook in Japan gives a clue. It isn’t making any progress at all. CULTURE plays a big part.

    1. Cody Robbins

      I think the reason they’re not converting to iOS and Android devices is because Japan has had mobile Web access since the late 90s. It’s not Web access like we know it on the desktop, though, and like what was brought to mobile in 2007 by iOS. It’s the Web for non-smartphones with microscopic screens and numeric keypads, and each mobile carrier has their own specialized version of it (i-mode, EzWeb, etc.). This was all very advanced—comparatively speaking, given the hardware at the time—until iOS was released, at which point it was totally leapfrogged and in contrast seems incredibly clunky and outdated. The problem is that over the last ten years an entire subset of the Web has been constructed in Japan for access predominantly over these mobile services—think crappy Web-based bulletin boards, restaurant websites, etc. It’s more or less what America Online was in comparison to the actual Web—except it’s persisted in Japan on these mobile platforms. It’s a bifurcation from the desktop Web we use, and now it’s entrenched. People don’t want iPhones there because iPhones access the real Web, not the i-mode version of it.I don’t think culture plays as big a part as it might seem. If all of a sudden China and India started using a technically superior, but non-HTTP/HTML/CSS-based, version of the Web, how quickly do you think American consumers would start buying devices that interfaced with it? Probably not very quickly, because all the content we consume is on the HTTP Web.The reason they don’t use Facebook is similar—they already had a competing Japanese social network called Mixi which was founded at about the same time. Up until a few years ago it had 80% of the Japanese social networking market. You could say that culturally speaking it was more closely attuned to the Japanese consumer, and that’s true. But I see a lot of Japanese friends moving onto Facebook more and more lately, which implies that the cultural roadblock to using Facebook is not as big as it might at first have appeared. It seems as though Facebook has just attained such a monumental critical mass that it has the momentum to even start smashing through Japan’s cultural tendency for insularity.

      1. jason wright

        Setting aside the OS and device focus for a moment, is i-mode analogous to what we’re now seeing with Facebook in the US and EU, a bifurcation to a walled garden private web behind a user name and password?

        1. Cody Robbins

          I should say I’m certainly not an expert on the Japanese mobile market and I’m simply synthesizing this theory out of what I know, but I’ve lived and worked in Japan and I have lots of Japanese friends; I’m a software engineer but I don’t know a thing about the technologies behind i-mode or even what it really is, but I’ve used it as an end user on a Japanese phone.My understanding, though, is that you are right and that it is very similar to the Facebook application ecosystem—I know that sites have to specifically be specially converted to work through i-mode, or use some sort of i-mode gateway to rewrite the site’s markup automatically. The old FBML API was probably closer than the current one. I think the mid-90s version of America Online’s service might still be the best analogy, though.

      2. fredwilson

        on the other hand Twitter is huge in Japan. maybe Twitter focus on short messages fits well with the mobile technology they use

  10. Jan Schultink

    Developers should consolidate these figures by language.1) Mandarin2) English3) Hindi?4) Spanish?…Somewhere at the bottom: Dutch :-)Language: the new borders of the mobile web.Merry X-mas to the community!

    1. Peter Farago

      we have data by language preference of the device owner.  could be a future research piece? 😉

    2. fredwilson

      great suggestion

  11. Brian Park

    This data is not objective and potentially inaccurate because it is first and foremost based on the notion that Flurry is successful with their own market penetration. I find it seriously hard to believe that South Korea is below Mexico and some if these other countries.

    1. Aaron Klein

      Always possible the data is off but Flurry is awfully well penetrated into mobile analytics.

    2. Peter Farago

      wait, i don’t understand your comment.  South Korea is doing phenomenally well!  on a total population of 49 million, we calculate that it has an addressable audience (middle class+ adults) of 26 million.  With an installed base of 16 million active users, it’s the 4th most penetrated company in the world (63%) and has the 4th largest installed base in the world for iOS and Android devices.  Mexico, by contrast, has a total pop of 113 million, but only a middle class of 20 million.  And it’s only 18% penetrated, with an active installed base of 3.6 million.  So yes, as far as upside, there are more middle class+ adults in Mexico who have yet to use an iOS or Android device.

  12. William Mougayar

    There is a big difference between ‘users’ and ‘usage’.I’m not sure if that is totally captured by this analysis.If you’re trying to reach the global potential masses that’s fine, but you also need to look at the usage-driven purchasing power of these users.For eg, the US has only 4% of the WW population, and about 30% of its wealth. Although there are strengths in numbers, you have to also look at the quality & depth of usage which are the more monetizable metrics, unless you’re a carrier just seeing subscription revenues.

    1. jason wright

      Yes, and what percentage of that 4% has the 30%?

      1. William Mougayar

        I was referring to country GDP numbers, ie overall economic output. One could also slice wealth by purchasing power per capita. I understand your question as it relates to wealth distribution, but that’s a different topic I think 🙂

        1. jason wright

          I was merely hinting that inefficiency in the distribution of wealth within a population is an impediment to economic activity. Everyone having a smartphone (users) is one metric, but if only a small minority of those users has wealth to spend then usage (expressing economic activity) is sub optimal. 

          1. JLM

            “inefficiency in the distribution of wealth”Haha, now that’s an interesting turn of a phrase.

          2. jason wright

            The greatest entrepreneur in history will be the one who can solve this inefficiency. I would suggest that this inefficiency is at the heart of America’s malaise.

          3. JLM

            @jasonpwright:disqus I really don’t think that America has a bad case of “malaise”, a term which harkens back to the Carter administration and which suggests that our current condition has been forced upon us and that we are otherwise hapless victims.America is suffering from the worst type of leadership imaginable in a time of self inflicted and eminently solvable crisis.We are truly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory because we are being ruled by politicians rather than statesmen.

          4. Carl J. Mistlebauer

            Actually, JLM, it is not only an “interesting” turn of a phrase, its also one of the fundamental aspects for explaining the lack of economic development in third world countries.  If you look at the Phillippines, a country that has always enjoyed high literacy rates and in the early 1960’s was actually considered one of the next 3rd world countries to develop, in fact at one time it was leading South Korea and Japan, in economic development.  But due to “inefficiency in the distribution of wealth” it never realized its potential and now finds its self being compared to Vietnam…..Entrenched elites, corruption, and confusing fuedalism for capitalism can go along way in the creation of inefficiencies in the distribution of wealth.

          5. JLM

            @tao69:disqus I agree completely with the underlying causes that you enumerate — including entrenched elites, corruption and a feudal system for the allocation of capital — but it is not about the “distribution” of wealth but rather the CREATION of wealth.The entire notion that wealth should be “distributed” after it is created is pure socialism hogwash.  That is just taking from the producers to unjustly enrich the indulgent or lazy.The idea that there should be fairness in the opportunity to create wealth is the noblest sentiment in American capitalism.In almost every clash between socialism and capitalism it is entitlement/redistribution v opportunity/productivity.  Capitalism is all about opportunity and competition both of which produce a stronger society and economic climate.

          6. Carl J. Mistlebauer

            JLM,When we talk about “American” capitalism and the idea of “entitlement/redistribution v opportunity/productivity” and then jump to the clash between socialism and capitalism we obviously are limiting our ability to truly see what the big issue really is.We love the narrative of capitalism vs. socialism, or the idea of the producers being attacked by the masses of indulgent and lazy but the reality is that true capitalism has NEVER been threatened by socialism and or communism but rather fuedalism has always found its self succumbing to socialism and communism.Thus, if you fear that the “producers” may find themselves threatened by the masses who are “indulgent or lazy” then you might want to check your initial premise of whether or not we are a truly capitalistic society….it might not be the threat of entitlement that you should be focusing on but rather the fact that you find yourself slipping back into feudalism.Nothing hastens the advent of totalitarianism and communism more than feudalism.While we love to romanticize Ayn Rand, we forget that the communism she understood came about as a violent response to feudalism not as an attack to capitalism.Feudalism CREATES wealth also, as does socialism and communism and unless the wealth is distributed based upon merit or effort it is unfairly distributed and anything unfair will not last.I think we need to see the current focus on the “inefficiencies” in income distribution not as a clash between socialism and capitalism but rather as a clash between capitalism and feudalism…I also believe that the recent battle over SOPA also highlights the rising threat of feudalism in this country; along with the use of terms like “job creators” and “too big to fail”.

          7. William Mougayar

            I don’t think a person’s wealth is directly proportional to what they will spend for a smart phone or on an iPhone. What is needed is a new metric- some kind of per capita smartphone purchasing power index. It’s like a coefficient that then gets multiplied by the user population. The US will stay on top most probably but the distribution for the other countries will be more revealing to marketeers.

          8. Peter Farago

            yes, that’s right. we didn’t assume people would buy an iPhone just because they could afford it.  our study took into account “ability to pay” to measure TAM, and then measured the number of devices we saw run an app over the last 30 days to give an installed base snapshot.  we could have looked at a longer window, i suppose, but treated all countries the same way (i.e., only took last 30 days), so think it’s apples to apples and provides a useful comparison

          9. William Mougayar

            Peter,- was there a per capita dollar number that you could derive from your data for each country? What I’m looking for is $ spend / user / year, excluding the base unit costs or carrier subscription services. In other words, what do users spend on their smartphone, after they acquire one?

          10. Aaron Klein

            Sorry but that is sheer baloney.There is not a fixed pie of wealth to distribute.The good news is, if you think you haven’t had enough wealth distributed to you…you can do something about that.Work hard, produce something of value and earn it.

          11. jason wright

            If that is so why is wealth not only not more evenly distributed, why is it presently concentrated in the ownership of such a very few? America is apparently built on the principles you describe, but as a mechanism for wealth distribution it doesn’t work. 10%-20% of Americans are effectively unemployed, the masses have negative personal equity, and the top percentile sit atop their pile of bounty looking down upon the rest. The bounty is so high that I doubt they can even make out what there is below to look down upon.

          12. Aaron Klein

            It all sounds well and good but the utopia you advocate isn’t actually achievable. Capitalism has delivered far more wealth to more people in 235 years than collectivism has in millenia.A great explanation of our two choices – the straight line or the jagged line – is here:http://www.aaronklein.com/2

          13. jason wright

            Reaganomics was trickle-down.Bush realizes that to get the same ideology past the electorate again he has to go at it from the other direction, hence the populist ‘rising’, but in using that word he gives the game away. You are down because that’s where the system puts you. That is statistical fact.       

          14. Aaron Klein

            Your response speaks volumes. No need to debate if that is your “set of facts.” Seriously laughable.In the spirit of Cheers, I’ll agree to disagree and raise our glasses to the holiday season.

          15. jason wright

            …and, Merry Christmas. 🙂

          16. jason wright

            I respect that you have a different outlook on capitalism. I call it ‘raw’ capitalism, or ‘brutal’ capitalism. With web technologies I believe that a new form of culture, society, economy et.c. will emerge,  and with it a new form of capitalism, a new use of the instrument of capitalism, one that serves the needs of far more people than it does at present. Capital will stop being the tool of the elite class in their control of the masses. I’m probably more of a believer in the possibility of progress to a more efficient form of capitalism than you. Fighting to get to the top is barbaric and a waste of resources. Civilization should aspire to be more productive than that.I’ll link this to SOPA. The sponsors of that legislation are proxies for the elite class in general who realize the web is THE force for change in our time and is therefore THE threat that could sweep away THEIR institutions of power. They want to stop than happening. They want to take control of the web for their own self interest.   Collectivism, socialism, communism, these are redundant words. We are witnessing the next stage of the evolution of human societies. Carlota Perez writes about it. The Arab Spring hints at it. We are communicating because of it. We should feel privileged to be alive at the exact moment it is happening. Embrace it.

          17. Aaron Klein

            I have never been a part of the 1% and I’ve never been controlled by them. Their money has zero bearing on my ability to earn mine.(Why in the name of heaven we decided to bail them out for their crappy decisions, I’ll never know. That’s certainly not capitalism.)Wealth is not a pie to be sliced up. Anyone connected with technology should understand this innately, but I’m surprised by the number who don’t.

        2. Peter Farago

          we had problems looking at GDP per capita at PPP.  It gave weird numbers because it’s just an average.  That’s why we took the extra step to dig up the actual size of the middle class per country, and limit TAM to only include adults, per IMF’s definition.  We felt this removed a distribution of data around the mean problem (knocked variance out), etc.

    2. Carl J. Mistlebauer

      In the early 80’s I worked in Saudi Arabia and one of the things that I found interesting was that whenever a Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or other third country national would go home for their end of contract vacation they would invariably ship home the largest TV they could purchase; and in a majority of cases they were shipping these televisions home to villages that had no electricity.Thus the idea of “ownership” and “usage” is one that needs to be thought through when making claims on a worldwide basis.

      1. ShanaC

        That’s super fascinating – do you think similar things are happening with cellphones?

      2. William Mougayar

        I wonder if that TV analogy translates into smartphones. The television broadcast infrastructure was more widespread than a high bandwidth digital infrastructure is today in less developed countries. TV: turn it on, hook it, flip channels. Smartphones are still a bit more complicated.

        1. Carl J. Mistlebauer

          Here you go William, fromhttp://www.brightsideofnews…”MOBILE PHONESHere the math gets a bit tricky. If we count actual mobile phone handsets connected and in use, we get one number. If we count mobile phone subscriptions we get another number. If we count unique mobile phone subscribers we get yet another number, and the math is even more fuddled by some of the poorest people, where families do not have a landline phone and cannot afford phones for all family members so they use one mobile phone as a family phone.In the Industrialized World countries, 96% of households have at least one mobile phone account. For the 1.2 Billion people living there are 1.3 Billion actual mobile phone handsets with 1.6 Billion total active subscriptions. For those homes that have at least one mobile phone, the average number of phones per active mobile phone household is 2.7. The phones are not shared, so the total population that can be reached using a mobile phone is 1.05 Billion [88% of the population].In the Emerging World, 59% of households have at least one mobile phone, and the total number of mobile phone handsets is 2.9 Billion, so there is an active phone already for 51% of the population living there. In the poorest regions [often beyond electricity] about 200 million households have one mobile phone shared as the family phone. Thus the total reach of 3.35 Billion [59%].When we add those numbers together, we find households that have at least one mobile phone, number 1.25 Billion, and they have a total of 4.2 Billion connected mobile phones in use including those people who carry two phones. The reach of mobile phones is 4.4 Billion which includes those poor households where mobile phones are shared.”That is mobile phone, not smart phones, but what is interesting is that we have mobile phone demand being satisfied where we have no electricity.

          1. William Mougayar

            Right. That proves my point that cell phones & smartphones have different demographics.

    3. fredwilson

      i think they used middle class as a proxy for purchasing power

  13. Vision

    IPhone GROWTH RATE  is reaching saturation point in US  if we take next 3 to 5 year time horizon.  Here I list couple of reason why Apple Iphone growth is in trouble  for next 3 years.1/ I would argue Apple IPhone thrived last 3 years due to lack of worthy alternative , Given Android caught-up in features and quality phones Iphone Edge is fast eroding.2/ World wide Symbian 16.9% Smart phone market(as of today) share will convert to MS Windows phone market share in  2 yearas  given  Microsoft tieup with NOKIA Share of worldwide 2011 Q3 SMARTPhone SALES to end users by operating system, according to Gatner.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M…Android:   52.5% Symbian:  16.9%RIM :         11% apple IOS:   15% Microsoft:     1.5%3/ Iphone penetration is minimal in China  and India ,  the two major mobile fast growing countries due to the price sensitiviy of these markets.  NOKIA,  Samsung , LG , HTC , BlackBerry carry close to 70% market share in both China and India.   Majority of them are still FEATURE phones in INDIA and CHINA ,  in the coming  2 to 3 years all these fearue phone will be convered to ANDROID and WINDOWS ( by NOKia ) Phones .  India/China Combined market 3 years fron now looks some thing like this: Android: 50% , Widows: 20% , Apple: 8%   4/ Here is the sample of  ANDROID phones that are selling in INDIA there days. This web site is like ‘Amazon.com of India ‘   http://bit.ly/uc5M6NSamsung Galaxy Y S5360   Price: $145 ( no Contract unlocked phone ) , look at 4.5 Rating of 630 people , highly Rated product . If you read reviews you realize how much people love these BUDGET AnDROID phones.  – Android v2.3 (Gingerbread) OS – 2 MP Primary Camera – 3-inch TFT Touchscreen – FM Radio – Wi-Fi Enabled

    1. Aaron Klein

      Oh you just wait until the Apple fanboys get their hands on you! 😉

    2. Mark Essel

      I think Symbian to Windows is an assumption is off. They’ll likely convert to iOS/Android.It would benefit the consumer if there was a competitive and viable third horse in the mobile race.

  14. Teren Botham

    I question the accuracy of this statistics with curiousity. Does it mean US has atleast 150 million users with either iOS/Android smartphones ??

    1. Peter Farago

      short answer is that the U.S. has 109 million iOS and Android devices that ran an app over the last 30 days.  To get the total addressable market (TAM), you would add the stats from the first and second charts for the U.S., installed base + remaining TAM that haven’t yet adopted and iOS or Android devices (109MM + 91MM = 200MM) Here are all the stats related to U.S. that we gathered and/or calculated:U.S. Population: 307 millionTotal Addressable Market (TAM) – Adult pop, middle class or above: 200.3 millionActive Installed Base (IB) iOS or Android device using app w/in 30 days): 109.2 millionPenetration rate (installed base / TAM): 54.5%Market upside (TAM – IB): remaining TAM not yet using iOS or Android): 91.1 million

      1. fredwilson

        thanks for all your replies in this thread peter. it is super helpful

  15. Chris Hill

    In thinking about the data a little bit more, my big question is which of the emerging markets listed actually has the infrastructure to reach those customers? How long and what is needed to actually build a support system so that mobile can reach all those potential customers?

  16. Adam Feldman

    Mary Meeker’s internet trends presentation pointed this out earlier this year. The size of the addressable consumer internet market in the US is a joke compared to China.

    1. William Mougayar

      You’ll need to factor in the purchasing power of those consumers. A consumer unit in the US does not equal a consumer unit in China from an economic perspective.

  17. ShanaC

    Why assume the middle class is going to be the great driver in all of this?Look at the history of Sears.  They reached out to a slowly growing more wealthy lower class with their catalogs and made a fortune.  What about mobile in that sort of context?

  18. Giddy

    These numbers seem very low to me. Maybe it reflects a snapshot of today’s reality. But as smartphones get cheaper and developing countries get richer I would expect far more than 122m new chinese users to be logging onto smartphones within the next year or two…

  19. Ram

    Stats are too real.Mobiles and apps will dominate businesses too.

  20. jason wright

    Long haul flights.

  21. fredwilson

    we have found that our style of investing (active, involved, lots of face time, engaged in team building, etc) cannot be done well farther than 6-8 hour flight times. there are plenty of investors who will be better at taking advantage of this opportunity than usbut the companies we invest in can build products/services for these users

  22. jason wright

    Maybe he doesn’t like curries and poppadoms :-)Risk – Legals. Management. Culture.

  23. ShanaC

    Parts of Brazil are as far as Europe, or not much farther.