They're larger than a smartphone and smaller than a tablet, and according to Flurry, 20 percent of all active devices are now phablets. The analytics division of Yahoo recently released a report that looked at the growth of the category over the last several years based on data from its proprietary platform.
- Only 3 percent of active devices were tablets two years ago.
- 36 percent of active Android devices in the month of March 2015 were phablets, compared with only 4 percent on iOS.
- In 2013, only 10 percent of Android phones were phablets. By 2015, phablet share has nearly tripled to 27 percent, largely at the expense of medium phones.
- In some early adopter markets like Taiwan and Hong Kong, the share of active users on phablets is 50 percent.
"It seems consumers worldwide are smitten with the combination of a large screen size and good old fashioned cellular telephony," the report says. "If there is one lesson to be learned in the phablet revolution perhaps it is this: Don't bet against the Asian early adopter markets; they are usually onto something big."
Despite Flurry's numbers, when is the last time you heard a developer talk about developing a "phablet app?" Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the day is that, if this is a form factor on a growth curve, there may need to be more thought into the specific user experience of apps on screens that fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Already major app stores such as Google Play have created labels such as "Designed for tablets" to help consumers make more careful choices. It will be interesting to see if there really is such a thing as a phablet-specific UI, or if such an app will forever straddle their other mobile brethren.
For more:
- get the report here
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