Smartphone usage no longer restricted to the metros in India

Recent developments suggest that India is taking big strides towards becoming a country with a huge base of smartphone users. This comes as the latest findings by MapBox, an online platform that allows you to create customised maps, reveal that the smartphone usage is no longer restricted to the five metros of the country.

“Mobile devices + Twitter use” is the facility used for this purpose. It reveals the information about phone brands when people tweet using the official Twitter App on their smartphone. This is done using the metadata that is attached to each tweet sent using the mobile app. So, when a person sends out a geo-tagged tweet using the Twitter app, it reveals information that includes the phone brand/OS and location. This information is then used by MapBox to plot the location of the tweet on a heat map. Each brand of phone is plotted using different colours and can be independently toggled.

A heat map of Mumbai showing the spread of smartphone usage in the city

The study revealed that though the Twitter usage through smartphone was largely concentrated to places like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata, it was slowly spreading to the smaller towns like Warangal, Jabalpur, Kanpur, Kurnool and Belgaum.

It also states that in India, an Android-based smartphone was preferred over a BlackBerry or an Apple. In almost all the places, Android (highlighted in green colour) had dominated the market. Apple-based smartphones were widely used in the wealthy sections of the country as Malabar Hill in Mumbai and Nungambakkam in Chennai, while BlackBerry had a scattered usage.