Local App Developers Needs Mentorship, They Just Don’t Get it

I can tell you for a fact that I get more than 15 apps to review every month. Some of them comes from Africa while a good number also comes from Eastern Europe and Asia. I also get Kenyan apps to check out. Few wow me so they don’t go beyond my trash folder while sometimes I even feel insulted that anyone might try to contact me to share such a shoddily done app.

There are moments when I appreciate the effort and honestly tell the developers. I have been told of an upcoming app by a friend on Facebook. The friend (name withheld) has been telling me of an upcoming app “which will wow the hearts of soccer lovers.” The app was supposed to be out by 9th January for review. I always don’t give a hoot on the deadline given out by the developers so I thought I could just let them do it at their own pace. It is very hard surviving as a mobile app developer from Africa. The odds are against you in many ways.

So the app, Payuka, was meant to wow me as a soccer lover to get to share the fun of soccer with other football fans. First in Swahili, Payuka means shed original colour (fade) or wobble (flip-flop).

The app in question is more of a confused undertaking than a serious challenger. You know which apps rocks in the Android market when it comes to soccer news. They are the Goal, Eurosport, Livescore and ESPN’s ScoreCentre of this world. None of these apps can be replaced by such a lousy app called Payuka. You see, most of the above apps depends on very comprehensive database to get me football scores, stats and related news and allows me to share the experience with my friends. The apps gives me scores in realtime which Payuka will not manage (it is just not easy to do that).

I strongly believe that Payuka should have started by focusing on the Kenyan Premier League then from the earnings, branching out to other East African states. Content is not an easy thing. And when you want an app like Payuka to rely on RSS/XML feeds for survival, you are basically deceiving yourself. There are many factors which makes it hard for such an app to get the correct feeds. You can’t just rely on third-party data to effectively run a data hungry application like Payuka. YOU WONT SUCCEED!!

The apps like Goal and Eurosport provides you with even second-by-second Tweets, posts and Facebook comments which Payuka will never manage. Eurosport and Goal have further ability to even stream videos live or recorded.

The gist of this post is that not well app developers should not chew what they can’t swallow. You are biting big chunks. You can’t beat the competition by building shaky castles on windy planes. You need to start small and expand gradually. Content is KING. On apps like sports scores and news monitoring apps, as long as you rely on third-party data, the users will not take long to figure the source and they will go to the source. Provide unique, consistent andd ever virgin data. Don’t be scavengers for expired data.

Payuka is a great app in feel but the was the app pulls data, it means that it has to rely on some third-party source. This is the time for app developers to sit down and develop apps for soccer in Kenya since the season is yet to start. When the season starts, you will get those who would want the scores of Gor Mahia, AFC Leoparts, Ulinzi, Mathare, Hope and others on their fingertips. We are missing the chance by focusing on areas already saturated.