Nigeria Just Crossed a Quiet Milestone: Three in Four People Now Carry a Smartphone

Three in four Nigerians now own a smartphone. Two years ago, that number was closer to two in three.

The figure comes from the Nigeria Smartphone Study, a joint report by KPMG and Orange Group Nigeria released this week, which surveyed 13,251 respondents across 12 major cities and found smartphone ownership rising from 64% in 2023 to 75% in 2025. It is the kind of statistic that sounds abstract until you sit with what it actually means: a country where the internet-enabled phone has quietly become the default, not the exception, and where the shift away from feature phones is accelerating in step, their share falling from 36% to 28% over the same two years.

Android accounts for the overwhelming majority of that growth, 88% of surveyed users, split across a device market shaped almost entirely by price rather than preference. Tecno leads individual brands with 30% of the market, followed by Infinix and Itel, the trio of affordably priced manufacturers that have quietly done more to put Nigeria online than any single telecom campaign. Apple's iPhone remains a minority presence, present but nowhere near dominant, in a market where the phone that wins is the phone people can actually afford.

Lawrence Amadi, KPMG Africa's Partner and Head of Technology, Media and Telecommunications, framed the study's purpose plainly: giving businesses, investors and stakeholders coming into Nigeria a clearer read on consumer behaviour before they commit capital. Ernest Ezenna of Orange Group Nigeria pointed to the same three forces driving the shift that usually get cited and usually understate how fast they're compounding, a young population, improving connectivity, and smartphones that cost less each year relative to income.

What the study captures beyond ownership is what people are actually doing with the phones once they have them, and this is where the numbers get interesting for anyone watching Nigeria's fintech landscape specifically. Financial applications now sit among the most consistently used categories on Nigerian smartphones, and OPay leads that category outright, present on 69% of the phones surveyed, ahead of every individual traditional bank app tracked in the study. Fintech, in other words, is no longer competing with banking as an alternative. On the smartphone itself, it is already winning.

The study is careful not to let the headline number tell a cleaner story than the data supports. More than a third of mobile subscribers were still on 2G networks as of May 2026, according to figures from the Nigerian Communications Commission cited in the report, a gap that means owning a smartphone and having a genuinely usable connection to the internet remain two different things for a significant share of the country. Nigeria had 157 million active internet subscribers that same month, with data consumption topping 1.5 million terabytes, both record highs. And yet a separate GSMA figure, reported by Nairametrics in September, put the number of Nigerians living inside mobile broadband coverage but not using mobile internet at all at roughly 140 million people, a usage gap nearly as large as the population using the internet actively.

Smartphone ownership, in short, has become close to universal aspiration and increasingly universal reality. What people can actually do with that phone, on a 2G connection, on a tight data budget, still depends heavily on where in the country they happen to be standing. The device reached three in four Nigerians. The infrastructure underneath it is still catching up to meet them there.

As more of Nigeria's financial life moves onto the smartphone in your hand, Monica moves with it, fast, simple and built for how Nigerians actually use their phones.

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