Sometime back, I had a conversation with Kirui, who is the lead of Consulting at iHub and therefore my boss, as he was writing a post reviewing Kenyan apps; you can read the posts here and here. In this conversation he lamented the dearth of Kenyan mobile apps. In addition to that he noted that the quality had not been fantastic as apps were not improved upon.

I posited to him, and do so here, that this may be because we as techies in the Kenyan ecosystem have for the longest time made fun of the mobile app craze we had mostly in the years 2010 to 2012. In fact there’s even a name for them, m-vitus (vitus is Kiswahili for things), making fun of the fact that a lot of the mobile apps at the time were named in the mpesa style and prioritized mobile (mPrep and mCollector are a couple of examples taken from past Pivot Easts). As a result, it seems to have become unpopular to build mobile apps, particularly consumer facing ones.

This is my tribute to the greatness that is Google; a company I love and want to work for one day because they’re such an integral part of my internet experience. Some I’d like to outline the reasons for my adoration of Google.

The Search Engine

Firstly (and obviously) is the search engine. This is the core part of their business; bringing in over 90% of their revenue despite several efforts to diversify. It has helped me research assignments, blog posts and find cool stuff on the internet. If I want to find something online I ask Google first before anything else and since I’ve been using it as me (meaning logged in) for over 6 years now, it almost always knows what I’m asking for and delivers it first.