The Development of Mobile Application Software

The popularity of mobile application software in the past few years has surged with mobile applications giving PC/laptop applications competition for the same consumers. Companies such as Apple having noticed this and for that reason are now the owners of the world’s largest app store with over 500000 products to choose from. This was done by licensing individual developers to develop their software for their OS instead of letting their developers have to constantly come up with new applications to compete with other OS’ products such as those of Microsoft Windows or Linux.
One of the areas where mobile apps have found a large market is in the games market where the total revenue raked in is more than 3 billion dollars annually. The gaming industry has attracted some of the biggest names in the tech industry and made them spend a significant portion of their budget in game development. Of the gaming apps available the Freemium method of payment is the one that is most popular as it gets people addicted to the games early by virtue of their first successful attempts only for them to have to pay beyond a certain point.

Alternatively, gaming companies can also offer a few low level games for free and then charge a fee for the better games on the premise that the consumer will have liked the first game so much they are willing to risk buying   the more popular game. Games that have yet to fully take of in Africa are the massively multiplayer online role playing games due to the high cost of developing such a game as well as the inability of most internet providers to cope with the server demands and the high cost of connectivity. The only alternative that is competing with the game industry is social networking software that has seen African developers launch their products and have them become successful on a global level. The most successful of these is 2go which at one point was the most popular social application among youth given its anonymity and ease of access. As more youth continue to get into the field of mobile software development, and given a training institute is already there in the country, we can only hope to see the field with more software tailor made for Africa by Africans.