Pavement condition monitoring (PCM) systems are essential for making decisions on road maintenance and rehabilitation toward preserving roads and airports assets in a good performance for a longer time. Modern smartphones are equipped with adequate storage, computing and communication properties, besides built-in sensors that show an excellent capability to capture information about users and the environment around us. Therefore, it is worthy to be used for efficient and cost-effective PCM. This review aims to survey the researchers' efforts on the application of smartphones for PCM, mapping the researchers' views from the literature into coherent discussions and highlighting the motivations and challenges of using such technology for pavement defects detection. Based on the existing literature, it was found that the smartphone applications technology is feasible and accurate to some extent as an alternative for conventional technologies for rural, highways and airports PCM. However, this technology is still in the first stage and many factors, calibrations and standards need to be studied and developed in future research in different countries at the various environments and different smartphone features. For example, one of the shortcomings of using smartphone-based sensors technology is the collected data is not directly collected from the pavement surface but is inferred from the data that resulted from the interaction among the vehicle, driver and pavement. This data processing could create limitations on the accuracy of such technology. It is also expected that data generated by sensors will vary according to the smartphone properties, sensor conditions, behavior of drivers, vehicle dynamics and conditions that lead to differences in recorded data. Therefore, such technology still needs further investigations and evaluations, especially in data collection accuracy. This review is expected to help in understanding the existing development, motivations, challenges, research gaps and future directions in the application of smartphones for PCM.