Part 1 of 5
Part one of It's time to pick up the smartphone. The report hub has all five parts, the sources and the PDF.
There are roughly 350–400 million active smartphones in use across the EU, derived from a population of 449 million and Eurostat's household and adult ownership rates, and consistent with annual shipments of 134 million against a 36-month replacement cycle (That's an estimate: no official EU installed-base figure exists). Fewer than a million of them are European-made. And a new platform can only grow as fast as people's pockets open up: Europeans now replace their phones roughly every three years. A wildly successful European brand selling one in every twenty new phones would, after three years, be in one pocket in twenty, and stay there for as long as its sales hold. One pocket in ten would mean one sale in ten, every year.
- 100% of European smartphones use core chipsets designed, manufactured, and assembled by companies outside the EU, some in the US, most in Asia.
- Almost every single European smartphone runs on an operating system (OS) controlled outside the EU (Android, iOS) with minimal niche exceptions only.
- Usage share for OS (StatCounter): Android (Google) around 60%, iOS (Apple) around 39%. No other platform reaches 1%.
- Critical new EU digital infrastructure for citizens, such as the EUDI wallet, will in practice only run on US-controlled operating systems, and the digital euro is on course for the same situation.
- With a few niche exceptions, mobile phones are no longer made in the EU, which once counted Nokia, Ericsson, Philips as its global telecom pioneers.
- Independent European platforms are technically possible; the Jolla phone and its Sailfish OS prove that, but they face gigantic barriers in ecosystems, scale, cost, and political will. The first new-generation European phone, Jolla's, began shipping in small batches in 2026; even an optimistic view would not see a European phone at meaningful volume before 2030.
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