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Why is the Quality of Kenyan Apps Going Down?
June 25, 2013 Editor 0
I am Kennedy Kachwanya and I think the quality of the apps being created has gone down. Recently I attended Microsoft Imagine Cup competition and I left the place a disappointed observer.
The quality of the apps and ideas by most developers were pathetic to say the least. I am not sure whether that was an isolated case, but then considering the fact that the likes of IBM don’t trust the local talents to run their innovation and research center in Nairobi, something is not right.
One would probably argue that Imagine Cup is for the university students, but those are our university students, where as a country we expect the best of the best from. In many parts of the world universities are where the research, innovation and invention usually take place. When our students can not come up and compete with the world best, then there is something wrong with the system which need to be rectified.
That brings me to the judging criteria. Kenya is full of winners, winners of all sort of competitions and challenges, but the pressing questions is do winners end up being something beyond the winning. Having been on this industry for a while, I don’t expect instant success but there is deafening silence about most of the winners to the extent that you would think that all their apps died straight after winning.
For example I have talked about Tough Jungle but the last time I heard from them was when they won the competition. Where is Ma3Racer which won the Pivot East competition last year, where are the guys who won the Startup Garage, how about the winners of Startup Weekend, same goes to the winner of Nokia Hackathon and Google Android Challenge?
Since the judges give all these apps thumb-ups, may be the problem lies with the judges or if not that then the criteria they use to judge them.
This was originally published by Kennedy Kachwanya as Safaricom Apps Development Challenge and Why The Quality Kenyan Apps is Going Down
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