Mobile telephony

Mobile phones existed in the 1980s but became mass technology in the 1990s and 2000s. The smartphone revolution began with the iPhone in 2007 and the rapid spread of Android phones thereafter. By the 2020s, over 6 billion people had smartphones. In many developing countries, mobile phones leapfrogged landline infrastructure entirely. Mobile banking (M-Pesa in Kenya from 2007 was an early model) brought financial services to populations the formal banking system had not reached.