Mobile payments set for immense growth by 2018

A new Gartner analysis predicting the future of mobile suggests mobile payments could be the most important development for the sector. Gartner predicts 50 percent of consumers in mature markets will be using mobile payments by 2018. The technology has received the most attention from Apple Pay and Android Pay, which both use NFC on smartphones, though the former supports it on the Apple Watch while the latter can be used on Android Wear. However, NFC will see limited adoption because of a lack of partnerships with retailers, according to Gartner. Other popular options for mobile payments are through dedicated retailer apps and mobile wallets from banks. The Starbucks app is one of the most popular forms of mobile payments in the US

In China, the most known form of mobile payments is through the omnipresent WeChat app, which can produce a QR code that transfers a set amount from a user’s WeChat Wallet. There are many new ways to pay for things through smartphones now, and they’re all contributing to the rise of mobile payments. This will make smartphones even more essential and central to many people’s lives, if that’s possible.

Gartner also predicts that 75 percent of TV-style content will be watched through mobile applications by 2018. Cord-cutting has been a notable trend for a while, especially among younger demographics. Many people no longer subscribe to any home-television service, using their computers, smartphones and tablets to consume all their media. This is having a huge impact on the pay-TV industry, of course, but it’s also significant for smartphone makers and mobile operators. On the smartphone side of things, consumers’ sense of “low resolution” screens might skew upwards. High definition displays with a 1080-pixel support often are no longer eough. People want 2K and 4K resolution. While streaming HD content can eat up a lot of data limited for most users, it seems to be a concern big enough for Google to chew out T-Mobile in the US for downgrading YouTube video quality. Likewise, though Gartner predicts less than 20 percent of users in mature markets will be using data-only mobile connections by 2019, there are already signsthat the mobile data people do get on their plans is enough as home broadband subscriptions have slightly declined in the US. Data-only connections remain much more important in developing markets.

Technological advances make it possible for people to rely on their smartphones. With mobile payments, consumers don’t need to walk around with wallets full of cash and cards. High-speed mobile connections make it possible to count on these devices for entertainment as well. While developing markets do not have the same needs quite yet, hardware such as LTE radios, high-definition screens and NFC are essential in mature markets. Even though NFC payments have not taken off yet, the choice to leave the component out of the OnePlus 2 was widely criticized by reviewers, indicating that the technology is now one of the bare necessities of a modern smartphone.