The Programmes Manager, Google, sub-Saharan Africa, Mr. Chukwuemeka Afigbo, speaks with OZIOMA UBABUKOH on the company’s online payments for App developers, among other issues
Why is Google spending so many resources on its developer initiatives? Why is this group important to you?
What are some of the things you have been working on and how have you been supporting these developers?
These
come in four categories: design, develop, distribute and monetise.
Concerning ‘design’, we all know that if you fail at the design stage,
your product will ultimately fail. We have always tried to put the
spotlight on user-centric product or software design where we encourage
the software developers and product managers to focus on the user when
they design their products. This is particularly important in Africa
where the culture and usage habits of the people here are different from
the conventional usage habits in say Europe or the United States. To
this end, we are running a ‘User Experience’ design master class in
collaboration with the Pan Atlantic University in Lagos where attendees
will learn about how to consider local users when designing their
products as well as the best practices in product interface design such
as material design, a recent initiative by Google in the design space.
When
we talk about ‘develop’, we mean initiatives that encourage developers
to learn and collaborate around software development best practices,
tools and platforms. One example of this are the Google Developer
Groups, which are independent communities of developers supported by
Google who come together to learn and share around Google and open
technologies. There are currently 18 Google Developer Groups in
different cities across Nigeria: from Kano and Lagos to Enugu and Port
Harcourt, with more forming every other month. These groups hold events
and tutorial sessions where they learn and share the latest and greatest
in the tech space. We have also supported various technology hubs like
the Co-creation Hub in Lagos and the iDEA hub with presence in Lagos and
Calabar. These hubs are basically physical locations where a software
developer or tech entrepreneur can walk into and immediately plug into
an existing community of like-minded individuals focused on building
tech businesses. The spaces also provide access to constant electricity
and Internet connectivity, which are key ingredients if you want to
innovate in today’s world.
For
‘distribute’, we mean that after you have designed and developed your
product, you need to find the best way to get it across to the end user.
That is where platforms like Google Play for mobile apps and Chrome Web
Store for web applications come in. We recently unveiled an initiative
called the ‘Start-up Launch Programme’, which provides developers and
tech entrepreneurs with the tools and knowhow to take advantage of these
platforms to ensure that their amazing products can get to the end user
in the most efficient way possible.
For
example, more than 50 billion apps have been downloaded from Google so
far in about 190 countries across the world. We also try to show
developers and tech entrepreneurs how to build a community of loyal
users around their products using these platforms.For Monetisation, at
Google, we believe that one should not only be able to monetise their
innovation but that they should be able to actually go on and build a
business from it. This is why we are happy to announce that we recently
launched Google Play Merchant payments in Nigeria, which allows Android
developers in Nigeria today get paid when users from all over the world
download and use their applications.
How would you rate the development of the developer space in Nigeria?
The
software developer space in sub-Saharan Africa and Nigeria (in
particular) has grown in leaps in the last five years. While in many
ways this growth has closely tracked the growth of Internet connectivity
in the country, we think that there is a lot to be said for the
initiatives that companies like ours are carrying out in Nigeria.
Are there examples that you can share that show how much local developers are benefiting from Google?
For
instance, AfriNolly that emerged winners of the Android Developer
Challenge for sub-Saharan Africa in 2011 and has now gone on to build
not only a product and company, but an entire community spanning the
globe around African films on the mobile device, is a typical example. I
would like to talk about people like the students from University of
Lagos who developed an application called ‘FormPlus’, which allows
Internet users from all over the world with no programing skills build
web forms that accept file uploads at the click of a mouse. This
application was developed on our cloud platform for the Google Apps
Developer Challenge in 2012 and came first in the sub-Saharan Africa
category. Their application is now doing very well to the extent that
the last time I heard from them, they had more than 20,000 users
worldwide, many of them paying customers. And a host of others
How will developers now be getting paid for their apps?
Payments will be made via wire transfers straight into the accounts of the developers.
We know there is usually a revenue share. What is the revenue share with these app developers?
We
don’t share details on the terms of our agreements with digital content
owners. For Android apps, 70 per cent goes to the app developer and the
remaining portion goes to the distribution partner (carrier or OEM) and
operating fees.
There are still developers who complain about the cost and quality of Internet access, what do you have to tell them?
I
agree that the cost and quality of Internet remain a challenge in
Nigeria. And in many African countries as well, but we have taken the
extra step by actually packaging a lot of the software developer
educational content. They include technical documentation, tutorial
videos and software developer kits, that were previously only available
online, into an offline format via DVDs / USB drives and making this
freely available to developers across Nigeria and the rest of Africa.
Any developer who is interested in this content can connect with our
Google Developer Groups. I would however like to say that I do not think
that Internet access is an excuse to give up on the push for success.
What other opportunities are still available for young Nigerians itching to start business in the growing developer space?
The
opportunities are endless because they exist in the solutions to the
challenges that we are facing today. If you think of all the things you
do from when you wake up in the morning to when you go to sleep at
night, there is a business opportunity for technology in each of them.
However, it takes some perseverance to get things going mainly because
this is a new frontier for technology. Nigeria is a country that is rich
in entertainment content, from Nollywood to the music industry, even in
the drama that occurs in our daily lives. I believe that we have only
begun to scratch the surface in terms of how we can use technology to
bring this content and these stories to the world. There is also the
issue of logistics and transport. I think a lot of exciting things are
happening in this space.
We
keep hearing of MNCs and other big tech companies buying apps for lots
of money. Do you see any Nigerian developer being able to break into
that group of multi-million dollar acquisitions any time soon?
We
are already beginning to see the first signs as homegrown Nigerian
companies in the e-commerce and entertainment space are beginning to get
millions of dollars in investment from within and outside the country.
Some of them are already expanding into other African countries. As
these companies continue to grow and succeed in creating local solutions
to local problems, I know that we will see some of them being bought up
for millions of dollars or even buying up other companies for millions
of dollars.
