Smartphones are increasingly becoming embedded in geography curriculums, meaning research is needed to gather insights from the student perspective to guide best practice for optimised implementation across diverse cohorts. This is particularly important in the context of ensuring that UN Sustainable Development Goal 4 (Quality Education) is met. In this article, we report on the role that student competency in technology (i.e. everyday user versus occasional user) and sub-discipline (i.e. human geography versus physical geography) plays in student engagement with smartphone technology to support active learning. Exercises were developed in Survey123, Field Maps, and QField for QGIS across undergraduate and postgraduate geography programmes. Focus groups identified three common themes among students in response to the use of this mobile technology in geographic research. Firstly, our research highlights the need to consider technology learning as a dynamic entity, perhaps even a continuum, with students identifying negative opinions of their technology skillsets, even when their baseline was quite advanced. Secondly, such activities should not necessarily be uniform across cohorts of students, with our results identifying substantially different responses across undergraduate and postgraduate cohorts. Finally, we highlight the need to think critically about whether such smartphone applications are necessary for all data collection tasks across different application areas, with a preference for human geography exercises identified by students.