The pace of hardware-based innovations in smartphones is on a decline this year, which has directly reflected in the purchase decisions of people. With brands like Apple providing software updates for an extensive period of time, people are not finding good reasons to consider upgrading their smartphones, confirms a survey conducted by Strategy Analytics.

The research team conducted an online survey involving 2,500 smartphone users residing in the US in a wide age group ranging from 18 years to 64 years.  According to the survey results, people use their smartphones for 32.9 months before considering an upgrade to a newer device. In case you’re wondering, that is about 3 years of using the same smartphone. For comparative analysis, that is almost an increase in five months when compared to 2018’s survey results conducted by the firm.

The duration is even longer with baby boomers (55-64 years old) as they tend to hold on to their smartphones for up to 39.7 months. Millennials, however, are the fastest when it comes to upgrading smartphones as their average smartphone replacement cycle stands at 30.4 months (2.5 years).

“Operators and device brands face significant inertia given consumer perception of diminishing innovation or marginal value add in successive generations of flagship devices. At the same time vendor pursuit of profitability has seen smartphone prices rising towards and above $1,000. Prices for 5G phones will be a key barrier despite 1 in 4 recognizing it as being important for their next device.”, said David Kerr, Senior Vice President at Strategy Analytics.

The survey also mentioned that iPhones on an average performed well without any major issues for a period of 18 months while the duration is marginally lower at 16.5 months for Samsung devices.

The firm believes that the replacement cycle could reduce drastically next year since a lot of smartphones supporting 5G will be launched in the market this year. So, when did you upgrade your smartphone the last time? Let us know in the comments.