The winners of Safaricom Appstar Challenge, Mr Gerald Kibugi (left) and Mr Jamlick Maina (centre) celebrate after receiving their award from Information PS Bitange Ndemo. Photo/SALATON NJAU
What you need to know:
At the just concluded Safaricom Appstar Challenge, a gaming application called Tough Jungle won.
The application allows the user to play with a moran who runs through different terrains and at each stage the user has to overcome several challenges and unlock new levels to advance.
Gerald Kibugi, who wrote the application, won Sh1 million as prize money and is set to showcase his application in South Africa alongside his counterparts from Tanzania, Lesotho, South Africa, Egypt and Qatar in a Vodafone-sponsored competition.
Writing an application that can become an instant success is a dream that every software developer would like to see come true.
However, few achieve this goal and fewer still manage to make money out of these applications.
One of the major obstacles for Kenyan geeks is that the mobile apps market is still in its nascent stages and many developers are yet to learn the ropes of turning their works into viable businesses.
In the past few years, however, fortunes have been changing for innovative app developers as their income increases and more users buy middle to high-end smartphones.
Entertainment applications have in particular become a favourite of many users with developers creating gaming, music and social applications, some of which have been exported to developed markets.
At the just concluded Safaricom Appstar Challenge, a gaming application called Tough Jungle won.
The application allows the user to play with a moran who runs through different terrains and at each stage the user has to overcome several challenges and unlock new levels to advance.
Gerald Kibugi, who wrote the application, won Sh1 million as prize money and is set to showcase his application in South Africa alongside his counterparts from Tanzania, Lesotho, South Africa, Egypt and Qatar in a Vodafone-sponsored competition.
For Mr Kibugi, the success of his application is his greatest achievement so far despite having designed more than 100 applications under his start-up Elan Technology.
“At the time I came up with Tough Jungle, I realised that there have been no games based on the Kenyan setting apart from Ma3 racer and that’s when we developed the idea of the game,” he said.
Mr Kibugi first entered his application at this year’s edition of Pivot East where the application was placed in the semi-finals but lost out due to inadequacies in the graphical make-up.
Ma3 racer, another gaming application, won in the competition that drew several dozen developers from across East Africa.
The demo version of Tough Jungle had more than 2,000 downloads and an average rating of 4.2 out of five points.
Its full version will be launched in January 2013 in Android, Blackberry and iOS platforms, the developer said.
Erik Hersman, the co-founder of the iHub, has organised and has been on the panel of judges of several app competitions, pitch events and conferences in the country.
Mr Hersman says the newfound success for developers of entertainment, particularly gaming applications, does not necessarily signify a shift in consumer trends, but is rather an indication of a growing mobile apps market.
“People have always been interested in entertainment applications and anything from news to sporting applications and music has had a generous following among consumers,” he says.
However, Mr Hersman says that the numbers have not been as big as to drive the growth that many developers would like to see although this is slowly changing.
“There are more people today with phones and data connectivity to access applications; so it makes more sense for developers to create products for these new users and in this regard we see more of everything including entertainment apps.”
Mr Hersman further says the growing apps market and the corresponding trends in consumer spending habits is identical to other markets in the world and the same factors apply to the Kenyan setting.
“We are going to see a lot of growth and people buying and consuming apps in the coming years and this of course means that developers will become the biggest winners.”
His sentiments are echoed by Dr Joseph Sevilla, Strathmore University’s senior IT lecturer and director at the iLab incubation hub in Nairobi who led the selection of the apps presented at the Appstar challenge.
“With a 99 per cent Internet access rate through mobile devices, there has been a marked growth in mobile application development in Kenya over the last few years,” Dr Sevilla said.
“Usage patterns of the subscribers including access to social media, communication and gaming have helped developers to create solutions from opportunities within these fields”.
Developers of entertainment have an advantage in that their applications, if crafted properly, are easily adaptable across the regional and international market.
To the surprise of the respective developers, Ma3 Racer had over 840,000 downloads registered in the US, India and Vietnam while Tough Jungle had the greatest interest from gamers in India.
The success of the Kenyan products in markets far afield means that as much as developers should code applications by Kenyans for Kenyans, creating a product that can go viral in a developed country is more desirable, especially when it comes to sourcing funds to develop the growing business.
