Image from Shaka Zulu restaurant, Camden, London

We spend so  much time in the focusing on the big markets, that we forget that the mobile revolution is having the greatest impact on countries in Africa, where mobile has empowered people to connect and share for the first time.     To try find out more, I convinced our friend Jono, who works for the amazingly useful Android app, MNUZE to put down his vuvuzela long enough to give us his perspective on the South African mobile market.  Here it goes:

The mobile app market in South Africa is an exciting space right now and is very much a mixed bag of opportunities presenting themselves to the user and developer. High mobile-penetration rates compared to low PC-penetration rates mean that mobile is fast becoming the platform for the Web.

To date possibly the most successful mobile application in South Africa has been the social chat service MXIT, originally just supported on Java ME based phones but since has expanded to Blackberry, Android and iPhone exceeding a total of 9 million users locally.

Initially Nokia about a year ago was the first to the market announcing the launch of their OVi store, trying to encourage South African developers to develop and publish to the Ovi store locally.

Blackberry seems to have secured a very strong foot print over the past year or so, offering users the ability to have an unlimited internet surfing experience. From an application point of view unfortunately not many of the offered applications in Blackberry’s App World are geared to the average South African and the prices still remains high and in dollars.

Android on the other hand up till now has been slightly on the more expensive side, in some cases more so than the iPhone. With the introduction of more affordable handsets we should begin to see more movement in the Android market however. Just recently Vodacom announced the launch of a range of ultra affordable phones, including one Android powered phone titled the Vodafone 845.(Available in UK here) Currently the Android app market only gives users access to free applications and not the paid applications as yet.

Thanks so much for the info Jono, and check out the Mnuze app for Android in the mean time that lets you view local menus and opening times  from 1000s of local restaurants.  We will be doing a full review of it, when we get done deciding what to eat.

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