But in the face of the latest mobile usage figures worldwide and the fierce competition that mobile applications are waging on the main app stores, it seems necessary to me to rethink in depth the adequacy of native mobile applications for the African public and to explore some new opportunities.
The figures, unthinkable a decade ago but now announced for mobile penetration on the Continent, have quickly made startupers and established companies understand that a large part of the business would now be played there: where the customer is located, on their mobile. This widely held conception is further reinforced by policies implemented by majors (Google with Android One) and national authorities to push the smartphone equipment rate of populations. It is also no longer a secret to anyone that more than 150 million individual Facebook users are in Africa and more than 80% of these users connect to the planet’s first social network via their smartphone, with a +20% increase in the number of subscribers from Africa from 2016 to 2017.
Social networks, with Facebook in the lead, constitute indeed the primary use African internet users make of their smartphone, followed by messaging applications, games, and then the rest. On the African continent where Android is overwhelmingly the leading mobile operating system, most of these applications come pre-installed on smartphones and Facebook, via the Free Basics or Internet.org program, provides a basic internet connection free of charge to access mobile applications of its ecosystem and those of its partners.
This state of affairs has a corollary: most smartphone users know little about app stores at a time when most business applications published by local players are drowned in the midst of 2.2 million native mobile applications published on Google’s Playstore. The battle is fierce at the bottom of the table, while GAFA apps economically cannibalize this increasingly competitive new market.
In light of these realities, it is appropriate to ask whether the native mobile application model is still the most suitable for local developers, to whom they have been widely sold as the panacea for taking their share of the revenues generated by the net economy. Answering in the negative to this question seems, from my point of view, increasingly obvious in many respects. Indeed, to adoption concerns dependent on user literacy (more than half of the populations south of the Sahara are still illiterate) and their low digital culture, is added the still exorbitant cost of data, a significant brake on downloading applications from stores and on usage.
Jimmy KUMAKO, CEO of CoinAfrique, points out quite lucidly this relentless observation: “Customers don’t feel the need to waste data to download applications that they only use once in a while, and in countries like BENIN, mobile applications are still often shared via Bluetooth”.
In terms of usage, Recode notes that application downloads in the United States from stores (Google Play Store and Apple Store) fall by about 20% year over year while outside the US, the top 15 mobile applications had grown by less than 3% in terms of downloads in June 2016.
Comscore, an American advertising analysis and marketing research company, goes further: According to published Insights, in June 2016, more than 60% of smartphone owners download no new applications over an average period of 3 months and more and more studies show that the retention curve of the user on a mobile application has never been so low.
What then are Progressive Web Applications?
Back to basics: native mobile applications appeared as the solution for mobile content access because they filled the gaps related to the user experience of web applications on mobile. But it goes without saying that they came with their share of shortcomings that we will no longer list here.
Progressive Web Applications tend to fill these gaps. They provide, through new Web APIs, and by relying on Web standards and a common browser, a set of features that were previously present only on native mobile applications.
These features include:
- extremely low loading times,
- the possibility of using applications in offline mode (without Internet connection),
- Push notifications,
- installation on the home screen.
A Progressive Web App uses the possibilities of the modern web to deliver a user experience similar to a native application.
With PWAs, the mobile Web is catching up with applications installable from an app store thanks to the manifest file for applications, support for home screen installation, the ability to run background tasks with Service Workers, improving loading time with an App Shell, and the renewed belief that Web developers can also offer an excellent mobile application experience.
As the name of the concept suggests, the next battle for mobile usage will move back to the browser. And once again, the Web majors are leading the race. Google was the first to update its browser, Chrome, to integrate all the features necessary for its compatibility with Progressive Web Applications. Opera, Firefox, and soon Microsoft with Internet Explorer, and… Edge, follow.
For any informed user, the opportunities for local content providers seem more than interesting:
- Better management of poor quality internet connections thanks to cache control,
- No need for much data to make services and content available to customers: A browser is enough
- notifications and installation on the user’s mobile phone desktop
- the possibility of better visibility on the traditional web and independence from store competition and the dictatorship of the majors.
- a single application for Web Desktop and Mobile
- a better integrated and clearer information system
Some continental players such as Konga, a major e-commerce player in Nigeria, have not waited around to redevelop their web application, and others should follow soon.
The fact remains that in a continent where the browser has not, for a decade, been the first reflex of smartphone owners, where literacy needs can be a brake on the first connection and where content providers have rarely made web referencing their priority, challenges have not disappeared and Progressive Web Applications are still not a panacea.
