In the next three years, the number of smartphone shipments worldwide is expected to more than double. That might be easy to believe if, for instance, we were talking about five shipments doubling to ten. Big deal. In actuality, though, those numbers are going to go from 472 million in 2011 to 982 million by 2015.

That’s nearly ONE BILLION SMARTPHONES. That’s almost 1 smartphone per person in the developed world.

And as far as smartphone owners go, in a couple of years we will simply call those people “China” because of the country’s insane growth of mobile app adoption in 2011: From January to October, the number of smartphone owners using apps on a daily basis grew 870%.

Lookout Mobile Security put together an infographic illustrating this and more startling info about the astronomical growth rates of smartphone users and the apps they love. It’s hard to imagine that, just ten years ago, words like “smartphones” and “apps” were scarcely even in the collective conscious of humanity.