The World’s Most Popular Phone in 2019 Will Probably Surprise You

What is the most popular smartphone in the world? Throughout 2019, the answer to that question appears to have been Apple’s iPhone 7.

Device detection tech firm DeviceAtlas recently came out with new data about smartphone popularity globally. The firm looked at device usage statistics ins 36 countries across the world.

Here are some of the findings of the firm’s report.

Most Popular Smartphone

As mentioned earlier the iPhone 7 seems to be the most popular smartphone model globally. According to the data, the iPhone 7 was the most-used smartphone in 22 of the 36 countries that DeviceAtlas tracked.

That includes the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Russia, Denmark, Norway, Colombia, Japan, Turkey, Singapore and others.

The remaining 14 countries had other smartphones at the top of the list, but for seven of those 14 countries, they were just other iPhones.

1. In Canada and Israel, the most popular smartphone this year is the iPhone 8, for example.
2. In Mexico, Malaysia and Thailand, it’s the iPhone 7 Plus.
3. The Philippines’ most popular smartphone was the iPhone 6, while Nigeria’s was the iPhone 6s.

If you’re doing the math at home, you’ll probably notice that this means seven countries had an Android device as their most popular smartphone model.

1. Xiaomi’s Redmi Note devices nabbed the top spot in India and Ukraine.
2. In Brazil, Argentina and Indonesia, the most popular smartphone is the Samsung Galaxy J2 Prime.
3. In Egypt, the device was the Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime Plus.
4. Unsurprisingly, in Samsung’s home country of South Korea, the Galaxy Note 8 took the top spot.

Android vs iPhone?

In addition to the most popular smartphones, there are some other interesting tidbits in the report — which actually looked at the top 12 devices in each of the countries listed.

When it comes to Android versus iPhone, it seems like India and Japan are opposites. In the former country, not a single iPhone makes the list. But in Japan, there weren’t any Android models to be seen.

Those appear to be outliers, since most of the other countries had varying mixes of Android and iPhone devices in their top 12s.

In the U.S., iPhones managed to nab pretty much every spot except numbers 9 and 10, taken by the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S9 respectively. Those models appeared to be more popular than the iPhone 6 or iPhone XS, which ranked 11th and 12th respectively.

There’s a lot more in the data that we can’t cover here — like statistic and market share changes year-over-year. So, if you’re interesting, you can take a look at the full report here.

A Few Things to Note

It’s important to note that these statistics don’t represent the best-selling smartphone in each country. Instead, it’s the smartphones that the most people seem to be using this year. That’s because of DeviceAtlas’s methodology. The firm makes device detection APIs that websites can implement. That way, they can tell which specific device models are visiting their sites.

The 2019 data was based on mobile web traffic to a network of partner websites that are using this device detection API. The data was recorded in Q2 2019, which could explain some of the models that made the list.