Despite the persistence and scale of marketing from makers of mobile phones to push their AI products, new results from our 2025 Hypertext Mobile Survey shows that people in South Africa are still mostly split on the importance of AI software on smartphones.
According to htxt’s readers, with over 800 surveyed, 52 percent said that on-device AI was a major factor when thinking about buying a smartphone, while 48 percent said it wasn’t.
With only a four percent difference, the responses show that South Africans are still not sure how important generative AI products like Galaxy AI, Apple Intelligence and more are when it comes to smartphones.
Some companies have thrown themselves head first into their AI campaigns. Earlier this year, Chinese brand HONOR revealed its AI-focused Alpha plan set to influence its smartphone software planning and implementation for the foreseeable future, alongside how it chooses its partners.
Another telling factor for companies in South Africa, is that when asked which smartphone brand features the best on-device AI, majority of respondents, 38 percent, said they didn’t know. Meanwhile Samsung and Apple were the most-chosen brands by a wide-margin.
Though this follows the general trend of respondents across most questions, that Samsung is the top choice for smartphone, followed by Apple and then Huawei. The possibility is that users are not too aware of the differences in AI features between the brands and models and simply go with their own limited experiences.
This would track with comments made by iStore CEO Chris Dodd to Hypertext earlier this year, that South African customers are still not clued in when it comes to AI thanks to the novelty of the technology, and companies are spending considerable resources in education on their AI products.
The missed promise of an agentic Siri was definitely not a consideration for customers when they bought so many iPhone 17 models that the Apple reached a September revenue record of $102.5 billion, the biggest iPhone sales the company has ever had in the quarter, per CEO Tim Cook.
How do users in South Africa use AI on their smartphones?
When respondents were asked what they use their on-device AI for most, nearly 60 percent said they use the chatbot implementation to “Ask questions.” This was followed, though by a wide margin, by using AI to browse the internet and then to write emails and messages for them, and then make summaries of documents.
Generating or editing videos and images were among the lowest chosen use-cases, which is interesting because the features that allow this are among the most-often spoken about when it comes to smartphone brands.
It will likely be a few years before South Africans truly embrace AI on their phones, or completely reject it. Companies continue to push AI features that may not be used by most respondents, but as these features become more intuitive and improved, this may change.
The question of “Do South African users really care about on-device AI?” finally gets an answer, and the answer is mostly yes.
Article originally posted on htxt.co.za
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