The 2007 iPhone did not stay alone for long. On 22 October 2008 the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) went on sale in the United States: the first phone to carry the Android operating system, which had grown out of a start-up Google had bought in 2005. Android was open-source, had no licence fee, and was given free to hardware makers (Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony, then Xiaomi, Oppo, Huawei). While iPhone held the premium segment, Android reached down into the 100-dollar Indian and African markets. In 2011 global smartphone sales overtook traditional "feature phones."

Apple's App Store opened in July 2008 and Google Play (initially "Android Market") in October 2008. These stores were not just distribution channels; they brought a new economic model: 70/30 revenue sharing, global reach for developers with zero marketing budget, payment infrastructure already in place. New companies were born almost overnight: WhatsApp (2009) made instant messaging free; Uber (2009) crushed the taxi market; Instagram (2010) was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars eighteen months in; Snapchat (2011), Tinder (2012) and TikTok (2016) were all born mobile. SMS, the printed newspaper, the digital camera, the GPS device, the MP3 player, the portable DVD player — all slid inside a single device.

Apple released the iPad in 2010 and pulled the tablet category, until then "a limited niche," into the mainstream. In 2010 there were about 700 million smartphone subscriptions worldwide; in 2015 that crossed 4.3 billion, in 2020 around 6 billion, in 2024 about 7.2 billion — roughly 90 percent of the world's population. In many countries, people's first experience of the internet was not a desktop PC but a cheap Android phone; in India and sub-Saharan Africa "computing" was born mobile. This was the fastest global spread of a technology in modern history: electricity took 60 years and television 30 years to reach the saturation that the smartphone reached in fifteen.

The consequences cut both ways. On the positive side: money transfer (M-Pesa in Kenya), telehealth, mobile banking, online education, maps and navigation, translation assistants, earthquake warnings, organising revolutions (Arab Spring 2011, Gezi 2013) — none of this is thinkable without smartphones. On the negative side: the attention economy, constant notifications, social-media addiction, the youth mental-health decline measured from around 2012, the irreversible erosion of privacy, surveillance capitalism. The rectangle in your pocket is the symbolic object of the twenty-first century: simultaneously the most powerful tool and the tightest leash.