Smartphone Adoption Hits 55% in Canada, iOS At 34% Marketshare

Smartphone adoption has reached 55% in Canada, the latest research conducted by Catalyst Canada and GroupM Next reveals. Android has the largest market share with 45%, followed closely by iOS with 34%, while BlackBerry ranks third with 15%, and Windows has 4%, the survey of 1,100 smartphone owners in Canada — both English- and French-speaking — shows.

Canada smartphone usage

Smartphones are used for a wide range of activities, and the study has broken it down to three overarching locations, “On the Go,” “At Home,” and “At Work,” aligning specific activities with these situations.

While on the go, the majority of Canadian smartphone users used their smartphone to get directions (81%), find a restaurant (60%), check the weather (40%), and check Twitter (40%).

In terms of interaction with the smartphone at home, Canadians opt to pay bills on their mobile phone (about 10% of consumers — of those, 73% choose to do it at home), shop, and purchase products, the study reveals.

About one-third of consumers use a smartphone to check email, and 21% of them do it at work, and 23% of Canadians use their device for mobile banking. Of those, 12% do it at work, the survey highlights.

“For brands and marketers, the story of smartphone growth is no longer about market penetration. It is about where and how consumers use them,” said Jeff Lancaster, CEO, Catalyst Canada. “We need to get further away from the notion of mobile marketing as a silo and understand that marketing, today, includes mobile, includes traditional, and includes digital. In this broader picture, brands can be more meaningful and valuable to consumers by better understanding the settings in which they’re using smartphones, and understanding the information consumers are seeking and activities they’re doing at that time. Brands can then implement strategies that more closely associate their business with those activities, increase their visibility, and ultimately, become the customer’s solution.”

As the figures uncovered by the study show, feature phone owners have become a “minority,” as half of the smartphone owners have owned such a device for at least two years and 14% of users have owned a smartphone for at least five years.

Do you miss the company of a good old feature phone with a week of battery life?

Infographic – The State of Smartphone Behaviour in Canada

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