Nigerian mobile apps drown in sea of global content

 

Nigerian developers are struggling to generate revenue despite the massive potential of mobile software applications development in the area of wealth creation. This is due to the difficulties experienced by prospective app users in discovering their innovative solutions in a deluge of global content available in the most popular distribution platforms like App store, Blackberry World, Google Play, and Windows store. 

Market observers are however of the view that the inability of Nigerians to find and use locally-relevant apps is slowing down the growth of the country’s mobile app industry currently valued at $1 billion. “Local app discovery is a major problem for our growing industry”, said Kunle Ogungbamila, chief executive officer, Kuluya.com, African gaming site. “This problem is prevalent on the Andriod Playstore which is crowded, giving more prominence to established apps,”  Ogungbamila said in an interview. 

The applications industry would be worth US$25 billion this year, according to Markets and Markets, a global market research company. While the annual compound growth rate was 29.9 percent between 2009 and 2014, this figure is expected to rise as emerging markets, like Nigeria, create access for millions of people to be connected to the internet and join the race to launch relevant, locally developed apps.

Market observers however said Nigerians had succeeded in developing problem-solving and life-enhancing mobile app solutions. Some of the prevailing concerns being addressed by these software applications include: traffic, health, education, transportation, electronic-commerce, tourism and hospitality related issues, among many others.

According to them, the huge strides being recorded in mobile applications development was going unnoticed, because Nigerians were unable to quickly find relevant apps, without the distractions of applications that were only useful to people in North America and Europe.

At the last count, there are more than 1.4 million apps on both the iStore and Playstore owned by Apple and Google, respectively. Lending his own voice to the discussion, Hugo Obi, founder of Maliyo Games, said Nigerians were more likely to access the same mobile apps as their counterparts in Europe, regardless of whether those apps could function in their contexts or not.  “As a software developer, if you don’t have marketing muscle and budget to push your service, nobody will hear about them”, Ogungbamila further explained. 

Bankole Oluwafemi, a tech enthusiast and blogger, said that first-time smart phone owners had no clue of the sort of mobile apps to download. According to him, they tended to stick with the popular apps that had been pre-loaded on their devices, instead of finding new services for themselves.

“A lot of these people turn to mobile phone ‘engineers’ to download apps and music for them, often for a fee. These mobile engineers carry around a generic collection of apps that are ready to plop on each customer’s phone in mere minutes. The collections will typically have the most popular, global apps that everybody knows, but rarely include local, Nigerian apps”, Oluwafemi noted. 

Stakeholders in the country’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry perceive mobile app development as a veritable platform to empower Nigerian youths, specifically in the areas of entrepreneurship and human capital development. The federal government has also developed frameworks to drive this new area of growth and sustain its contributions to economic growth.

One of the known efforts of government was the creation of incubation centres for app developers across the country. Industry observers say Nigerian internet users are increasingly consuming more and more content online. 

There are 13 million Nigerians using Facebook. According to a recent research by TwinePine Research entitled ‘The State of Digital Media,’ 83 percent of social media users in the country is active. Twitter, the microblogging website has about six million Nigerian users. As at February 2015, Nigeria had 83 million mobile data users, according to the figures from the Nigerian Communications Commission’s (NCC) website. Latest estimates on smart phone adoption in Nigeria put the number at around 20 million devices. But, despite the obvious convergence of mobile and internet, local applications struggle to get past a few hundred downloads.

by Ben Uzor