Third World Tech Problems

Have you ever wondered how tech industry in third world problem is? I’m going to tell you about it.

I’m a mobile app developer from Myanmar(Burma) and I’m writing about our tech problems. Our country has a population of 50 millions and 20 millions have mobile phones now. Most of them use smartphones. So, let’s say that there are total of 20 millions smartphone users. But the problem is only few companies is getting revenue from them except operators and mobile phone vendors. Why??? We have four main problems as far as I know.

Slow Internet Connection

It’s typically slow and expensive. It will cost over $1000 for fixed internet installation fees (ADSL, Fibre and WiMax). The montly fees is about $100 for 1 Mbps. Yes, you read that right. And it’s also not stable. Most of the people can’t afford and they only have to use cellular data network for accessing the internet. Cellular data costs around 6 Ks/MB ($5/GB) ($1 = 1300 Ks). And it provides 2Mbps bandwidth for average. You may think it’s cheap but our minimum salary is $2 per day. So, lots of people can’t download much. They may only use Facebook and Viber. They don’t want to download an app with large file size. And it takes about 4 hours to download a 1GB file.

Lack of online payment

Most of us don’t have any online payment system(credit card, debit card, paypal, mobile money, etc…) Why? because of the sanctions, even though some are lifted. 1 US dollar worth 1300 Kyats which is our currency unit. And we are buying/selling in cash for everything. We have to carry money in gunny bags if we are buying something such as a house or a car (But not as bad as Zimbabwe). Since there is no online payment, the e-commerce system isn’t develop much. If we are selling products online, we have to use cash on delivery method or transfer money via local banks. If you are selling a digital product such as an app or a song, you should sell scratch cards for your own products. If you want to sell your scratch cards country wide, you have to talk a lot with marts and mobile shops, give them some percentage of your sale. The cost for scratch cards and distribution costs a lot. Payment system is a big problem for all of us.

No Copyright law

You can’t copyright your creation. You can only trademark a logo. Since there is no copyright law and no online payment, lots of tech companies can’t enter into the country’s tech industry. We can’t create an Apple ID with our country’s address. Although Google supports Myanmar, lots of apps (often paid apps and apps with in app purchases) are not available in my country. No Netflix or Spotify. Few of us uses debit cards from Thialand and Singapore to solve this problems (I subscribed to apple developer program with a debit card from Thailand and Google Play Developer with a card from Singapore), but you simply can’t target a few local clients. Even some companies have to register at a foreign country just to create iOS developer account with their company name.

Font Encoding Standards

There is also a big problem in Burmese font encoding standard. The one which follows unicode standard (we simply call it unicode font) and the other which doesn’t follow standard but misused the code points (we call it Zawgyi). Zawgyi is popular among users and 90% are using it. Although our Unicode font is included since Android 4.4, users root their devices and install Zawgyi, otherwise their phone have Unicode and they can’t read their friends’ texts which is in Zawgyi. Only users who are too lazy to root their phones and developers use Unicode. Since Zawgyi has like 4 different code points for a same character, it is ineffective in searching and sorting. And it takes the characters of ethnic languages. So, you can’t read ethnic languages if you are using Zawgyi and it is a digital genocide. We can covert between them and that’s our current solution right now. I hope we can change Zawgyi users to use Unicode by law enforcement.

But…

these problems also gave us some advantages. Most people want to use Zawgyi, so the service technician can charge certain amount of fees by rooting and installing zawgyi font. They can’t download large files, they will pay you for downloading large files (There are some shops which sell pirated PC games in DVDs and make over $30k a month). Since the international tech companies can’t enter Myanmar, we can develop a clone (sometime a copycat) of a product which is popular worldwide. As I shown above, we can create our own App Store. We have our own book store and music store too. I’m also founding a startup named Tay (တေး in burmese word means Music) (Btw, you will only see burmese font if you are using Ubuntu, OS X or Android or you will see squares) which is a music streaming service.

We had an election on the first week of this month (November) and NLD party which is lead by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi won landslide. The new government will start ruling in April. We are hoping some changes and I also hope improvements in our country’s tech industry.

Please forgive my grammar and spelling mistakes.