Mobile Users > Desktop Users in 2 Years

Matt Welsh and Patrick Meenan from Google have a great slide deck up from Velocity 2012 called Taming the Mobile Beast.

It’s a great (though rather technical) read. One stat jumped off the page and gobsmacked me:

Mobile Users > Desktop Users in 2 Years

Holy crap. You know this is coming, but you don’t expect to glance up and seeing it barreling at you like a freight train. In Egypt, India, and South Africa, for the majority of Internet users mobile is the only way they access the Internet. According to a recent Ars Technica article, in 2013 smart phones will account for 54% of the global cellphone market.

Some lessons here:

  • If you aren't thinking of mobile when you're building your app, you're doing it wrong. (Good news: responsive design is pretty easy.)
  • If you are still developing with Flash (dead on mobile) and Silverlight (never really a "thing" outside of Netflix), you've gone flying past doing it wrong and into the realm of mimes and politicians.