Assessing pre-owned smartphones manually is not easy nor efficient. First, there’s a problem of scale—massive amounts of trade-ins are conducted every year. Here at HYLA, we processed 3 million pre-owned phones in 2019, which amounts to over 10,000 phones per day. Hiring the number of workers needed to assess these phones purely by hand would be cost-prohibitive, especially since some of these phones aren’t able to return much value other than the cost of their recycled raw materials.

For nearly a decade, Big Box Retailers like Best Buy and Walmart have been aggressively pursuing mobile phone sales. At this point, smartphones make up a significant portion of revenue.

Insurance is a big part of the mobile ecosystem. In 2013, Warranty Week estimated that more than 60%-66% of smartphones were insured through a protection plan.

Earlier this year, Market Reports Hub estimated the global mobile phone insurance market to be nearly $31B in revenue by the end of 2015.

The mobile device industry has long been one of the most complicated businesses—right up there with the process of buying a house or a new car.

However, OEMs didn’t have to worry much about this complexity because of the tight link that always existed between them and carriers.

I remember the last time I went in to buy a new mobile phone at a carrier store—the store was small, located in an outdoor mall.

Inside, there were three sales reps helping different customers and a few groups of people ahead of me, in line. It took about 20 minutes, for which I browsed in the crowded store, until someone was able to help me.