The app install challenge in Africa

The biggest challenge every smartphone app has, but doesn’t know it

Update — October 28th, 2021

This post was originally published in September 2018 based on research we did in April / May that year which ultimately led to the development and launch in December 2018 of our #datafree MoyaApp in South Africa.

The research was focussed on the propensity of people in South Africa to install and use mobile apps, with 441 survey responses.

During 2019 and 2020 we collected a further 157,000 survey responses through the #datafree MoyaApp Research platform.

I have updated this post to reflect the much richer data set.

There’s an app for everything!

The Silicon Valley inspired ‘there’s an app for everything’ model has become a huge industry with over two million apps in the Google Play and iPhone App Stores generating billions of dollars of direct and indirect revenue.

This is all well and good in developed economies where the average smartphone user has a high specification device with a big screen, plenty of storage, access to virtually unlimited broadband data and high disposable income.

People in these markets install apps on a whim and happily might have 30,40, 50 or even more than 100 apps installed on their phones at any time, many of which are used rarely or have been forgotten about.

Not so in developing and emerging markets

At Datafree in South Africa we learned the hard way that despite offering awesome #datafree single purpose apps which were free of mobile data cost to use, the number of downloads and installs was vastly less than expected.

This was somewhat baffling given our core understanding that Data Affordability is Key to Online Engagement in Emerging Markets and certainly is the case in South Africa where mobile data costs are comparatively high, as highlighted by a popular #DataMust Fall social media campaign.

We gradually realised in a region such as Africa there was what we came to call an “app install problem”.

Analysing our own data supported by anecdotal feedback led us to develop the hypothesis this was due to:

• limited storage capacity on the lower cost devices most people were using;
• the data cost to download apps (plus updates);
• user concern that apps consume previous data in background mode and “steal your money”;
• the perceived value of an installing app compared with the easy utility of Google Search and web browsing.

Quantifying the app install problem

To test our hypothesis in April / May 2018 we conducted a survey with person-to-person interviews in two Cape Town township communities and a digital survey with mobile consumers in the Gauteng region. We collected a total of 441 responses.

Since then we have collected a further 157,000 survey responses using the Moya Research platform.

The survey results confirmed our hypothesis with some particularly startling results.

Highlights include:

• 55% of people have phones with 16 GB of storage capacity or less;
• 85% of people buy airtime data in amounts of R50 ($3.30) or less;
• 90% of people regularly run out of data;
• most people have irregular or no access to Wi-Fi.;
• the majority of people have 5 or less apps on their phone (that they installed);
• 84% of people have WhatsApp installed, 77% have SHAREit and 50% have Facebook Lite, 30% have Opera Mini Browser — after that the tail of installed apps falls away rapidly;
• the factors people consider most before installing an app are:- available phone storage (30%), data cost to download (26%), how much data an app will use once installed (20%), how long they might want to use it for (12%) ;
• 79% of people regularly get apps through file sharing with friends (using SHAREit) instead of using data to download from the app store;
• 46% of people said messaging was the activity they missed the most when they were without data, followed by Google Search (14%) and Social Media (13%).

Here’s a selection of results from the survey:

The full set of survey responses can be downloaded from this link: Datafree Mobile App Install Survey results (PDF file).

Conclusions

Outside of less than a handful of popular apps the average smartphone user in South Africa is very unlikely to install mobile apps, unless there’s a strong, compelling value proposition.

Messaging is the killer app of mobile for everyone, globally let alone in South Africa, and when people run out of data it’s the application they miss the most by far.

This fundamental insight led to the development and launch of our #datafree MoyaApp super-app in South Africa which includes messaging, content services and a mobile wallet.

With South Africa as the largest and highest GDP per capita economy in Africa, it would be reasonable to assume the app install problem is even more pronounced across the rest of the region.