Mobile apps take centre stage in Kenya

In 2011, Kenya cemented its position as a mobile application powerhouse in East Africa.

Investors flocked to the country to survey its crop of young innovators as the country’s first local app store was launched.

“We have seen the sector grow tremendously. We plan to expand local partnerships through our app store,” said Mr Job King’ori, Samsung’s digital content specialist for East and Central Africa.

The phone company will compete with a local start-up appstore, Virtual City’s Hewani. The store was launched in December and to many players, it is the culmination of a vibrant year for local developers.

The Hewani apps store will bring together more than 4,000 application developers and there are plans to expand it to the rest of the region come 2012.
It will distinguish itself in targeting low-end phone owners by hosting SMS-based applications in addition to high-end products for Android and iPhone platforms.

This tactic is in contrast to what is going on in the local market. Developers have increasingly shied away from serving low-end consumers, attracted instead by a fast-growing smartphone market.

The jolt created by Safaricom-subsidised Ideos was felt throughout the year. By December, more than 130,000 of the handsets had been sold with the figures expected to shoot up in 2012.

“The Ideos changed the way techies thought. Suddenly, it was trendy to develop for Android,” said the ICT Board’s local digital content manager, Ms Kaburo Kobia.

She said developing SMS and USSD applications for older model phones, while cheap for the consumer, is expensive for the developer.

“To create these applications, you need a relatively steady and strong revenue flow. Most developers don’t have this, so they go for Android, which can even be free in some cases,” she said.

Despite the shifting trend, Kenyan apps still flooded the Nokia’s Ovi store and the firm, so enamoured with the local industry, entered into several partnerships to sponsor local activities and competitions.

The Nokia Create for Millions competition in July was one such activity. Developers came together to create apps for Nokia’s Series 40 phones.

The apps targeted the lower end of the market, a reprieve for the millions of Kenyans for whom smartphones remain beyond reach.
Social issues and development.

What emerged from this competition, and others held throughout the year, was that a new brand of socially conscious entrepreneurship was growing among technology developers in Kenya.

While mobile money and m-commerce dominated the appsphere for most of 2010 and the first months of 2011, as the year came to a close, technologists turned their attention to social issues and development.

“There is an m-health fever in the country. The sector is also saturated with agricultural and educational apps,” said Strathmore technology researcher Jessica Colaco.

At the IPO48 competition in August, an app called Tusqee Systems, created to help schools keep track of fee balances and examination results, won the top prize.

MedAfrica, an app that provides a suite of health services such as symptom checkers and hospital locations, was the overall winner at Pivot25.