At the end of 2012, it was discovered by the Pew Research Center that close to 90 percent of adults in America owned at least one mobile phone (45 percent of which were smartphones). A similar trend has occurred in the East, as in Japan, the figure for smartphone ownership is 25 percent and there are 30 million smartphone users in South Korea. The Forrester Report believes that the smartphone usage figure in the Asia this year, will develop by 20 percent, whereas America’s figure is set to be half of that for 10 percent.
In light of this, there has been some quite notable development in the mobile space in Asia which is impacting that of the West. This includes: Kakao Talk (an app that lets users text, phone and share media for free is now its own platform for third-party apps). Line (a messaging app that first came into the market following the Tōhoku earthquake; today its users can access third-party developers under a similar structure). The second app has already reached 50 million users in just over a year and the Kakao Games platform launch got a staggering $35.3 million with 82 million downloads in just one month.