Jake Swearingen, The Intelligencer:

From roughly 2007 until 2013, the smartphone market grew at an astonishing pace, posting double-digit growth year after year, even during a global recession.

And:

Smartphone growth began to slow starting in 2013 or 2014. In 2016, it was suddenly in the single digits, and in 2017 global smartphone shipments, for the first time, actually declined — fewer smartphones were sold than in 2017 than in 2016.

And:

In 2017, per the International Data Corporation, global shipments of smartphones declined year-over-year for the first time in history. In 2018, IDC says the same thing happened in the U.S. market.

And:

Some manufacturers and analysts may hope that flat sales in the developed world could be offset by strong sales in other markets. Fat chance. The markets where smartphone saturation hasn’t set in yet — such as India, Southeast Asia, pockets of Latin America, and Africa — are different than the markets that fueled the first decade of smartphone growth. “In those markets, there are extremely competitive devices down near the equivalent of $200,” says Stanton. “It’s becoming a real battlefield, but it’s a low-margin business and consumers down at the those price points tend to be not very brand-centric. That really plays into hands of a few really hyperaggressive brands of smartphones, most of which are coming from China.”

But what about Apple? Can they continue to defy gravity?

While the rest of the smartphone market worries about commodification and what each brand will need to do to gain or defend market share in a world where smartphones are like cars, Apple stands alone. “Apple has a different set of options available to it,” says David Yoffie, a professor of international business at Harvard Business School who also sits on the board of HTC. “They have this extraordinary user base that allows them to do things other firms could never get away with.”

All of this is the lead-up to a very interesting analysis of Apple’s gravity defying potential. Good read.