Weekly poll results: half of users have phones that are 1 or 2 years old

Based on last week’s poll, half of the voters are currently using phones that are a year or two old. But that’s not the average age of a phone and that average may be growing – going forward, half of users will have a phone that’s 3 years or younger.

Let’s start with the first question we asked – how old is your current phone? The top answer was “1-year-old”, which suggests that a lot of people upgraded recently. There’s more evidence of that in the other charts too, but we’ll get to those.

Beyond a year, it’s a fairly even split between 2-year-old and 3-year-old phones. There is a surprising amount of phones that are even older – in fact, a third of voters are using a phone that’s at least 4 years old.

The second question – how old was your last phone? – shows that two-thirds of voters retired a phone that was 3 years old or older. Phones that lasted only a year or two are in the minority. Interestingly, phones that lasted 5 years or more are as common as phones that only lasted 2 years.

Not only did many people upgrade recently, they seem to be very happy with the phones that they got. The final question from the poll indicates that half of users plan on keeping their phones for at least 4 years. In fact, the top answer was “5+ years”.

The most common replacement age of the last cycle was 3 years (this was the answer from 25.5% of voters in the second poll). For many, this will extend by at least a year, possibly more. Meanwhile, the number of people who will upgrade after only a year or two will shrink to a quarter.

That’s a testament to phone companies building hardware that will last for years, even in the fast-moving world of technology. And the longer time frames of software support are certainly helping too. There will always be early adopters who get new devices as soon as possible. But unless phone makers come up with new “must have” features, most others will be happy to keep their current phone for longer than before.