Wherever users in Asia Pacific head for a summer break, it seems like the one item they aren’t willing to leave behind is their smartphone. We looked at a few summertime rituals across Asia (inspired by colleagues who did a similar rundown in the U.S.) to mark the rise of mobile searches in different countries, and here’s what we found:

Japan: Fireworks and Festivals
In Japan, nothing symbolizes summer more than the fireworks that light up the warm night sky at various festival dates across the country. Mobile searches for “fireworks”, or 花火, were 7 percentage points higher in May 2014 than they were this time last year, and 25 percentage points higher than May 2012.

[Image] Mobile Percentage of Searches for “Hanabi” or fireworks in Japan
Source: Google Data, 2013–2014 Obon (お盆) is a traditional festival that’s usually celebrated among friends and family by going out into the countryside for a week or so. You can see that mobile searches for Obon are also higher than ever.

[Image] Mobile Percentage of Searches for “Obon” in Japan
Source: Google Data, 2013–2014 Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore: Eid Mubarak!

In Muslim countries, the summer is usually punctuated with the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, or Eid. What is fascinating from this chart is that the number of mobile searches went up by so much just from 2013 to this year alone.

[Image] Mobile Percentage of Eid-related Searches in Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore
Source: Google Data, 2013–2014
The big jump in mobile searches for Eid tracks the broad and rapid digitization of Indonesia as smartphones become more common:
[Image] Smartphone user penetration (% of population) in Indonesia 2012-2014
Source: eMarketer, June 2014 A fifth of Indonesians are predicted to have smartphones by the end of 2014 — more than double the number that had them just two years ago.

So however you celebrate your summer, the chances are that, if you’re in Asia, you start your celebration with a smartphone.

Posted by Dušan Farrington, Communications Manager, Google Asia Pacific