Issue:
October 2026
For surveillance and entertainment, North Korea’s smartphones have spread beyond cities
North Korea’s economy is unexpectedly booming. GDP growth has topped 3% for three consecutive years, driven by arms sales to Russia, trade in raw materials and finished goods with China, remote IT work by North Korean techies and dubious cryptocurrency transactions. One marker of this growth is smartphones.
“There's a lot of money coming into North Korea that is supporting this economic boom,” said technology analyst Martyn Williams at a press conference at the FCCJ on Sept. 10, during which he explained how the isolated, secretive country is using a robust smartphone market to create its own idiosyncratic digital economy.
Williams, a former FCCJ president, started following North Korea after a visit in 2002 piqued his interest. He later launched the NK TechLab website to share his observations of North Korea’s high-tech efforts.
The experience led to his current job as a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a well-known Washington, D.C.-based think tank. He focuses in part on smartphones because they “tell a larger picture about the development of the overall economy.”
“It is famously difficult to get reliable information out of North Korea,” Williams said. He gathers data from a wide and somewhat unusual collection of sources: state media, tourist videos and blogs, and satellite images. Observers occasionally get their hands on internal documents.
“In the last three to four years, the economy appears to have opened up quite considerably,” Williams said. The robust smartphone market is both driving and benefiting from that increasing openness.
His team estimates that around 7 million of North Korea’s roughly 25 million citizens are using smartphones. There are more than two dozen mobile phone brands, making for a competitive marketplace, Williams said. Smartphone prices range from the equivalent of $200 to $600. Satellite images show cell phone towers scattered across the countryside, suggesting smartphone use extends beyond the urban elite.
Previously, apps were limited to official state news, the works of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and the usual calculators and alarm clocks. But that has changed.
“In the last three to four years, the number of apps and the type of apps has become increasingly more sophisticated,” Williams said.
QR code electronic money platforms are particularly popular, with at least five apps competing for users. They enable payments for in-store and online shopping, as well as games and entertainment. Williams has catalogued more than 1,500 domestically produced smartphone apps and estimates that half are games and entertainment.
“There's a lot of competition in this area, and the state seems to, at the moment, be quite happy with the way that this is developing,” Williams said. He believes that the availability of domestic content has dampened demand for banned foreign videos and games.
While there is competition, it’s not an open market. To start with, almost all of the phones are made in China, with a few sourced from India. When the phones cross the border, they get loaded with locally customized software that ensures only state-approved apps can be installed and only state-approved content can be played. Wi-Fi is disabled on the North Korean phones.
“So you can't connect to any Wi-Fi signals coming across the border,” Williams said. “North Korean phones will only connect to North Korean phone networks.”
He said one of the reasons North Korea is allowing the development of a smartphone market might be to tighten citizen surveillance, adding, “As we know, our smartphones track us all the time.” Using a smartphone app requires logging in with a mobile ID. Applying for one requires users to submit their names and addresses, workplaces, parents’ names, and their state ID card number. For some apps, they must submit a video capturing their face from different angles.
Beyond surveillance, Williams suspects North Korea is embracing smartphones as part of efforts to stamp out corruption and theft, and to collect taxes. For example, customers can use smartphones to order medicines from the Ministry of Public Health and have them delivered, paying electronically. The smartphone infrastructure enables packages of medicines to be tracked through the delivery process, discouraging theft, and allows taxes to be properly collected.
Williams concluded that the use of smartphones “is bringing a lot more benefits to the state than the harms that it might bring.”
Dennis Normile is a contributing correspondent for Science and former president of the FCCJ.
