Relationships between Mobile-Phone/Internet Usage and Socioeconomic Development Level
Tianyu JIAO, Nathaniel MITCHELL, Runyu YAN, Xin YANG, Jingyi ZHONG

Abstract
With the rapid development of the smartphone market and smartphone technology, the smartphone has become a necessity for many people nowadays. More and more people develop a dependencyon their smartphone.Potentially it couldhavea negative impact onmany people’s lives. Having noticed this apparent trend of people’s addiction to the smartphone, we decided to explore the reasons why people use their phones so much, and it turned out that the overall socioeconomic development level(locally and nationally) has a huge impact on how people use their smartphones. In particular, in China’s provinces, there is a positive (linear) dependence of the Internet usage on disposable income. For developed countries, a power law is found in the Zipf plot of smartphone usage while there is also a negative dependence of smartphone usage on the country’s development level. These results are presented after a brief survey of previous studies. Finally, the positive effects of smartphone use in developing countries are noted.

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