From the frequency of the updates to flagship products you may get the impression that people upgrade their smartphones quite regularly. However, the latest DeviceAtlas statistics based on website hits from mobile devices reveal that older phones are still getting a lot of usage.

Many older phones still in use

Phones released in 2012 or earlier generate a significant share of web traffic in all countries we analyzed which means that they’re actively used. This is relatively surprising given that operators typically allow their customers to get a new device 18 months to two years for a discounted price or free of charge. Of course this does not refer to pay-as-you-go users.

A similar conclusion comes from a recent survey by Gallup which revealed that most Americans don’t upgrade their phones until they stop working or become outdated. The survey showed that 47 percent of Americans do not upgrade their iPhones and wait for the upgrade until their phones become obsolete. When it comes to Android users, 58 percent of them wait for the upgrade.

The 'yearReleased' property statistics

One of the 160+ device properties detected by DeviceAtlas is called ‘yearReleased’. It refers to the date when the device generating web traffic was made available to the market. DeviceAtlas users may use this property to target specific devices, e.g. older or newer devices, to optimize content or to serve device-targeted advertising.

Here are the latest statistics on the 'yearReleased' property showing the share of web traffic generated by devices released in different years.

Which older phones generate web traffic

To give you a full picture of which phones actually generate traffic, we also put together a table which shows when some of the more popular devices were released.