Instant messaging is reducing its usage for the first time in its young history

The use of instant messaging has decreased for the first time in its young history, according to GSMA sector statistics for 2022. According to the State of Mobile Internet Connectivity report, conducted by the Association of Telecommunications Employers with data from all markets and in the world, application activity for this type of communication has decreased Instant and free services fell one percentage point over the past 12 months, from 85% in 2021 to 84% in 2022. This slowdown affects platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, Teams, Google Chats, KakaoTalk, Skype, Facetime, Line, Snapchat, and Telegram, are all widely used by mobile phone users around the world. In fact, it is the most widely used activity on smartphones, even beating voice calls.

Voice and video calls over the Internet have continued to grow steadily in recent months, with… Daily use by nearly eight out of ten telecommunications users. The same happened with the consumption of free audiovisual content, dominated by video, which has already exceeded 70%. On the contrary, mobile news consumption globally has declined from year to year, reaching pre-2019 levels, with 55% usage in 2022, five percentage points lower than in 2021.

They also suffer from de-escalation Consumption of free-to-play video games is down 50% for the first time compared to 2019. Online learning through mobile devices also declined between 2022 and 2021, although in this case responding to the consequences of Covid, which has significantly accelerated online access to training content of all kinds.

The same report shows a global slowdown in the growth rate of mobile Internet adoption, due to the maturity of this type of service. After all, only 200 million people started using mobile internet in 2022 compared to 300 million in 2021 and 2020. With this data, mobile Internet adoption reaches 57% of the world's population (4.6 billion people).

However, mobile broadband coverage has barely improved in recent months 95% of the world's population already lives within a mobile broadband network. Despite this high percentage, 400 million people (5% of the population) still lack mobile broadband coverage, in rural, very poor and sparsely populated areas. Likewise, more than 3 billion people (38% of the world's population) do not use mobile Internet despite living in areas with mobile coverage.

Data traffic grows by 34% in one year

At the end of 2022, 54% of the world's population (4.3 billion people) owned a smartphone, although 350 million of these users do not access the Internet on the go. Likewise, global mobile data traffic per user per month rose from 8.4GB in 2021 to 11.3GB in 2022, representing the largest increase (34%) since 2015, the year since the GSMA achieved statistical stability.