Android in Africa

Apr 26, 2017

Yesterday and today ‘Netflix in Nigeria’ has trended on Twitter. It was picked up by every blog / newspaper as something amazing (which it most certainly is). Free launch PR of the like I haven’t seen for a consumer internet product in Nigeria. Dreamy, even. So jealous.

I thought I would take a quick peek at the data. Retweets aside, you know that’s important too. Firstly. Take the data with a pinch of salt. I believe this will change over time. Radically. And compared to Netflix, we perform incredibly well for Nigerians of a certain income bracket.

Today.

- iOS downloads in Nigeria — Netflix #1

- Android downloads in Nigeria — Netflix #126

- Android downloads in Nigeria — irokotv (beta) #207

So it’s not like our new Android product is setting the world on fire. But it’s beta and will (like Netflix improve). And it was only released on Monday. So nothing for nothing.

As I mentioned yesterday, we are focused on Nollywood, download and Android in Africa. We started that process 6 months ago. We are super early on this journey. The data shows it all. Africa = Android. Nigeria = Android. On Android in Africa, I think we are going to be okay. As I mentioned before, iOS is largely confined to the 0.5%. We are building our product to embrace the fragilities of the Android platform, yet also amplify its idiosyncrasies which are impossible or foreign to iOS as a platform.

Nollywood in Africa is surprisingly doing just fine, inasmuch as the data is a little old. Is it that young Twitter users don’t watch Nollywood? Perhaps so. But they are definitely in the minority.

Yesterday we released.