Estimating 2035 iPhone Users

Surveying multiple sources

We have a firm hold on the number of active devices as well as the number of iPhones in use. This is due to Apple reporting the data. The latest active device count was 2.5 billion and the estimate for active iPhones is 1.6 billion.

This patters also allows us to forecast the active base pretty accurately as the growth is predicted by the tight fitting linear approximation.

For more confidence it would be useful to confirm these predictions with different estimates. For this I turned to two additional sources: the Statcounter GlobalStats measure of Mobile Operating System Market Shares Worldwide coupled with Number of Smartphone Users Worldwide (forecast by Ericsson) and the Number of of iPhone Users from Bankmycell.

The total Smartphone Users history and forecast is shown below:

The Mobile Operating System Market Share Worldwide is shown below:

Multiplying these two yields the Mobile Operating System Users

The iOS users (orange line) can now be compared to Apple's own reported active device total (grey line) and the Bankmycell estimate as well as a derived estimate from Counterpoint (24% share of install base)

The graph includes forecasts from 2025 to 2029.

Discussion:

The data shows fairly well during the 2025 year and the forecasts do seem to converge. The only puzzle is why the OS Share estimate is lower during the 2017 to 2023 period. The OS Share estimate is based on recording page views to 1.5 million member sites.

For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device. For our search engine stats, we analyze every page view referred by a search engine. We summarize all this data to get our Global Stats information.

There might be more web traffic from Android devices for various reasons, including less app usage, more bot activity or other noise.

Whatever the reason, the prospect for iOS users is confirmed: about 2 billion active iPhone by 2030 is entirely feasible. The fact that Android users might reach 4.5 billion by then is not necessarily a bad thing. It suggests both a saturation point and an expanded addressable market for iPhone. Given that headroom and the switching rate in mature markets points to a potential iOS audience and hence Apple user base in the 2.5 to 3 billion range by 2035.

That, coupled with value captured per customer will determine the value of the firm.