Blackberry is a culture in Nigeria
In Kenya, Safaricom made the Huawei IDEOS available at a cheap and affordable price. This contributed to many folks moving to Android. In Singapore, China, North America, UK and some other countries, we can see people adopting iPhone en mass. From the responses above, it is clear that, until Blackberry pulls the plug and say they are not selling phones anymore, Nigerian are going to keep buying.
RIM is opening office in Nigeria
RIM is smart. They’ve seen this culture and they are coming to tap into it some more. They partnered with Mobile Web West Africa this year and sponsored the developer event. They gave a few Blackberry devices out to some developers and a Playbook during the event. They are even open to paying anyone who develops a Nigerian emoticon —like Yimu and the likes.
The users are here and growing. RIM has heard and they are ready to enable the platform for developers. What are you waiting for? Oh! I see! RIM is dead. No! RIM is not. Don’t read too much of Techcrunch, Verge and the like and use that as a measuring stick here. It is obvious that it is a different ball game entirely. Even the Kenyan market /users are different from the Nigerian.
Developing for the Mass market
Don’t use techies as your yardstick in developing mobile applications. The techies are a small set of people compared to the general users. I remember when Eskimi was giving a presentation at the Co-creation hub recently, in a room full of developers, the question was asked: who knows Eskimi? Only one hand went up. At the time, Eskimi had close to 2 million Nigerian users.
You’re most likely to have your developer friends carrying an Android and speaking about the opportunities that Android is going to offer. That is good. You also may not like Blackberry as an Individual, yes. But, do not close your eyes to the fact that there are lots of Nigerian Blackberry users. If you want to reach them, you should be thinking of how you can develop a unique offering for them and start smiling to the bank.
You should keep your fingers crossed. You can still read Techcrunch and the likes. However, we are the ones on ground, we talk to users, manufacturers, telcos and developers and we are more likely to offer you local and relevant information on how to tap into the Nigerian market.
Will you be developing for Blackberry? If you have something you have already developed for Blackberry, send me a shout out and let me take a look at it. We may be able to test it and help you push it out to users as long as it is a fine product / service. The feedbacks you get from us can also help you to improve your work.
