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.

So I’m seated in the library working on my CV, which I haven’t worked on in 2 years, since the end of second year – the last time I actually applied for an internship. I got the internship but couldn’t go because they got back to me late and needed a commitment of 4 months that I couldn’t do because I was going back to school.

While I was doing the updating, there was so much I had done that went down into simple statements like the one below: