The markets throughout that continent are primed and ready to take off in this tech field.
The future of mobile technology is one of the most common questions asked in the entire tech industry, and one of the areas where its impact and growth will soon be seen in the most rapid moving way is in the African market.
While smartphones are owned by the majority of people in many markets, they’re not there yet in Africa.
However, the African marketplace is now on the cusp of a massive shift in its mobile technology, sending its most common devices from being feature phones to smartphones. In this way, it is believed that a very unique bottom-up form of disruptive innovation will soon be underway. While certain barriers had been standing in the way of adoption of these devices until now mobile devices are growing in use and in expectation in this market and much of the service infrastructure has been growing to match, allowing for new devices to enter into the mix.
While Africa has stayed behind the smart device trend, it has also led considerable innovation in mobile technology.
Even with feature phones and other similar types of device, the African market has been able to use mobile tech in a way that has been truly innovative and useful. It has been able to overcome many of the hurdles that are associated with greater complexity and has looked to the core of the need associated with a service, so that this could be provided in a reliable and efficient way.
Africa has, therefore, become one of the markets in which cell phone based services, such as mobile payments, has been fastest to take off. In fact, mobile wallets are quite commonplace in many African countries for payments to merchants and between peers. This is because the majority of the population has a cell phone but is unbanked, so it innovated, using simple cellular phone features to provide access to digital money transactions.
Now, as mobile technology networks and services have started to expand quite rapidly in Africa, it is preparing for the next wave of tech, as penetration of smartphones starts to grow and is expected to take off exponentially over coming years.
