Smartphones serve an important role in providing people with meaningful connectivity – a crucial element in the development of digital economies. A4AI has set smartphone ownership as one of the four targets of Meaningful Connectivity, as an entry point for people to experience the full power of the internet.
In this third edition of the device pricing data collection, A4AI collected smartphone prices in 177 countries and feature phone prices in 90 countries. The prices were collected for new devices from the major mobile network operators between June – July 2022.
Despite the global shortage of microchips and supply chain issues, the global average cost of a smartphone went from 22% of the average monthly income in 2021 to 20% in 2022. A marginal decrease considering the importance smartphones play in the connectivity of people around the world and their role in securing meaningful connectivity and digital participation.
If countries around the world are to embark on the path to universal meaningful connectivity, increasing smartphone ownership has to be a central goal for policymakers working on ICT.
Device Pricing 2022 Blog
Device Pricing 2022 Dataset
This data was collected by Diego Aguilar, Dieudonné Muganga, and Malavika Shivaprasad, with supervision from Ana María Rodríguez Pulgarín and Teddy Woodhouse.
This database is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). This means you are free to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the database in any medium or format, even for commercial purposes, as long as you credit the Alliance for Affordable Internet.
Suggested citation: Alliance for Affordable Internet (2022). 2022 prices and affordability of smartphones and feature phones by country [database]. Retrieved from https://a4ai.org/research/device-pricing-2022/