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.

It’s been a while since I did an app review, probably because I haven’t explored that scene; I should probably look into that or something. Nonetheless, the app I’ll be reviewing today is called Safari Tales and it’s a production of Afrokidz Ltd. It has been made for Africa by Africans inspired by the diverse and rich African Culture. It is currently developed for the Android market for children between the ages of 2 – 9 years. That description has been stolen verbatim from their website :D!