Breaking into mobile apps market an uphill task for young developers

H ardly a day passes without a news report that a new mobile application has been developed in Kenya.

However, behind this success is the untold story of the challenges that developers face as they seek to break into the market and access funding to develop and market their inventions. Top on the list is lack of support from corporate organisations.

Most of the developers are either college students or fresh graduates and often lack the money to complete their projects.

To compound this is the fact that financial institutions don’t offer loans for software enterprises since most banks are yet to appreciate that intellectual property is something they can put money on.

Felix Kiptum, a developer of  a mobile application called Pesadroid that provides a database of mobile phone money transfer and payment services such as M-Pesa, is one such.

One year since he developed the app, he is yet to earn substantial money from it.

He published his application on the Android platform but discovered few Kenyan entrepreneurs have credit cards with which to pay for the premium application.

He decided to develop a free version of the app, which is available on the Android market but with limited features.

Within five months, his free Pesadroid model had more than 2,000 downloads. But the problem is that his main target is Kenyans who use M-Pesa, majority of who have no android or other smart phones.

According to a iHub Research survey released this month, Android-based devices form only six per cent of Kenya’s market.

Faced with this harsh reality, Kiptum has resorted to direct marketing but this has come with its own challenges.

A group of five students from Strathmore University has also developed an application called M-Calc that is targeted at farmers. They can download the app and sign-up for the alerts on  weather and how to care for their crops.

“We developed the application without doing any market research and we realised later that our Android and Ovi store-based applications is irrelevant to the farmers,” says Elisha Bwatuti, the team leader.

Mr Bwatuti says most farmers have no phones with features than can support the M-Calc applications, which has forced them to rework their application. They have now developed a system that can send SMS to farmers.

Many young developers are struggling to adapt to the dynamics of mobile phone applications in Kenya.