Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Motivating You with Just a Few Mobile Stats

If you thought Facebook was a force to be reckoned with, wait until you see mobile. You really can't grasp the power of mobile without seeing some stats first. Here are a few of my favorites:

• When compared to the world population, mobile devices comprise over 70 percent of the world population. This means that there's a good chance a good majority of the world's 6.4 (approaching 7) billion people are on a mobile device of some sort! This is astonishing! It means that you can now write software for mobile and pretty much guarantee that your audience will be able to use it. Just before I wrote this, the sales of mobile phones actually exceeded those of desktops. See why you need to have a mobile strategy?
• Half a billion people accessed mobile Web in 2009. Not only are people using their mobile phones, but they're also actually accessing the Web through their phones. In fact, over a year before I wrote this, one-sixth of the world was accessing mobile Web through a mobile device. This is probably exponentially higher as you read this, and probably why you should have a mobile version of your Web site ready.
• Seventy percent of Egyptian Internet users use only a mobile phone. Fifty-nine percent of Indian Internet users use only a mobile phone. Twenty-five percent of the United States Internet users use only a mobile phone. These are some of my favorite numbers. These numbers represent those people who have completely ditched their desktops ...