Device Insurance Statistics for a Four-Year Phone

A customer walks into a carrier store with an iPhone 13 and walks out with something newer. The old handset is four years old, still works, and is worth a few hundred dollars against the upgrade.

That transaction is now the centre of the device protection business, and it explains most of what the statistics do and do not say.

Device Insurance Market Size (2026)

Search for device insurance statistics and the first thing you get is a market size. It is the least reliable number in the category.

Three separately published forecasts for the global mobile phone insurance market in 2026 put it at roughly $41bn, $44bn and $50bn. Same product, same year, a spread of about a fifth between the low and the high.

The long-range versions diverge further, with 2032 to 2035 projections running from the high $70bns to nearly $100bn depending on which house you read and how it defines the category. Some count handset protection only. Some fold in extended warranties on laptops and appliances. Few say which.

None of them is much use for a business case.

What is useful is operator disclosure, because a company reporting to shareholders has to define its terms and gets audited on them.

The number that actually moved

Assurant runs mobile protection and trade-in programmes for carriers and retailers, and it publishes a quarterly read on device trade-ins. Two of its 2026 figures matter more than any market forecast.

In the first quarter, $1.63bn went back to US consumers through trade-in, up 31% year on year. The average traded-in device was 3.81 years old.

By the second quarter the company reported $1.43bn returned and a milestone: the average traded-in iPhone had passed four years old for the first time. The most common handset coming back was the iPhone 13. On Android it was the Galaxy S23 Ultra.

Four years is the whole story. Not the market size, not the attach rate. How long the customer keeps the thing.

Trade-in became the front door

The other shift is where protection now gets sold. Assurant reported 7% underlying growth in Connected Living for full-year 2025, and attributed it to mobile protection programmes and trade-in performance together rather than separately.

“As smartphone prices continue to rise, consumers are looking for smarter ways to manage upgrade costs, and trade-ins, especially when paired with protection, are playing a bigger role.”
Biju Nair, EVP and President, Global Connected Living, Assurant

Read that as a distribution statement rather than a marketing one. The moment a customer hands over an old device and finds out what it is worth is the moment they understand, concretely and in dollars, what the new one will cost to replace.

That is a better point of sale for protection than a checkbox at the end of a contract, and it is why device protection is one of the clearer working examples of embedded insurance: the cover attaches to a transaction the customer was already completing.

What a four-year hold does to the risk

A protection product written for a two-year replacement cycle and one written for a four-year cycle are not the same product, even if the wording is identical.

Manufacturer warranty typically covers the first year. On a two-year hold, roughly half the device’s insured life sits under someone else’s obligation. On a four-year hold it is a quarter, and the protection provider carries the rest alone. The exposure per covered device rises without a single change to the policy.

The failure mix changes with it. Year one and two are dominated by accidental damage: drops, screens, liquid. Years three and four add the wear items, batteries above all, plus port and button failures and the slow accumulation of damage on a device that has already been repaired once.

Those are different claims. A cracked screen is a fixed-price swap that a walk-in shop closes in an hour. A four-year-old handset with a degraded battery, a worn port and a previous screen replacement is a judgement call about whether to repair it, refurbish it or write it off, and the answer depends on a residual value that moves every quarter with the second-hand market.

Which is where the trade-in data stops being background and becomes underwriting input. A rising second-hand market lifts the value of the asset being protected and the cost of settling a total loss on it. The $341 average that Assurant reported for a traded Apple Ultra 3 smartwatch is, from the other side of the desk, a settlement benchmark.

Device Insurance Fraud Patterns

High volume, low value, remote handling and an easily substituted asset. Device protection has every feature a fraudster wants.

Zurich has described the patterns its systems look for, and two of them are device-specific: several claims filed at once for different people at the same address, and repeated handset claims traced back to a single purchaser.

Neither is detectable on the individual claim. Both are obvious across the book.

That is the general shape of the problem set out in our piece on insurance fraud statistics: the growth is in volume rather than in individual severity, so the defence has to run on every submission instead of being reserved for the cases an investigator gets to look at.

What the numbers imply for anyone launching one

Device protection is an attractive line to enter, and the reasons are visible in the figures above. Distribution comes with the retail transaction, premiums are small enough to be an impulse decision, and the trade-in flow gives you a live valuation feed for the asset you are insuring.

It is also a line where the product has to change more often than an annual filing cycle allows.

Device models refresh yearly and the rating factors are model, age, storage tier and condition at enrolment. A new flagship launch is a new rating row, not a new product. Handling that in rating engine tables an analyst can edit is the difference between covering a handset at launch and covering it two quarters later.

The settlement side needs the same freedom, because whether a claim is repaired, refurbished or cash-settled depends on a residual value that changes quarterly.

On the platform question the honest position is narrow. Openkoda is not a specialist device protection administration suite and would lose a feature-by-feature comparison with one. What it offers is that the product definition, the rating tables and the claims workflow live in a product builder you own rather than on someone else’s roadmap, and that one product can reach a branded page, a retailer API integration and an embedded partner checkout without being built three times.

The statistic to watch

Ignore the market forecasts. Watch the average age of a traded-in device.

It went from 3.81 years to over four inside two quarters of 2026, and every month it lengthens moves more of the covered population into the part of the curve where batteries fail, ports wear and repair-or-replace becomes a real decision rather than a formality.

That is the number that will move loss ratios in this line, and it is published quarterly by a company with no particular reason to flatter it.