Smartphone Innovation Is Dead

Looking for true innovation in the smartphone world? You’re not going to find it.

Michael Long
2 min readSep 6, 2024
Illustration ChatGPT

I continually read article after article that complains that smartphone innovation is dead. That says Apple is no longer capable of innovation. That Google and Android are resting on their larels. That all Samsung knows how to do is copy Apple.

That smartphones are a mature market, and that they aren’t going to change.

And you know something?

They’re right.

Think about it.

All Apple, Google, Samsung, and all of the others have done since 2007 is iterate on the screen-is-the-interface design. And they’ve done that primarily by making the screen bigger and bigger until it filled the front of the device.

And then, of course, they made the devices bigger. And faster.

Did I mention bigger and faster?

That’s it.

Modern smartphones are simply screen-dependent general-purpose computers that live in our pockets. And with cellular radios and wifi and cameras added they’ve pretty much supplanted every single device we once used on a day-to-day basis.

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Michael Long

I write about Apple, Swift, and SwiftUI in particular, and technology in general. I'm also a Lead iOS Engineer at InRhythm, a modern digital consulting firm.