The iPhone Skips Over Africa

by Te-Ping Chen · 2010-06-29 06:00:00 UTC
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Steve Jobs may not know it, but some of his biggest fans reside in Kenya. Even before the earliest iPhones were being sold in the country, enthusiastic programmers were already designing applications for the phone, anticipating the day the sleek devices would be sold in local stores.

Unfortunately, as Dayo Olopade writes on Foreign Policy, for the majority of Africans, "Apple effectively doesn't exist." Even as Chinese importers jockey for African consumers, and companies from Nokia to BlackBerry have set up offices on the continent, Apple continues to sit coolly out on the sidelines.

For example, Olopade notes, for Africans, the iTunes store's offerings are unavailable — African IP addresses are blocked. Likewise, the iPhone is sold for an outlandish $1,000 at local stores, a price that outstrips what a similar model would cost in the U.S. many times over.

Given Apple's reputation for cutting-edge development, the company's absence from the African continent is especially disappointing. As we've often chronicled here before, from mobile banking to crisis-mapping to farmers' use of cell phones as a price-gauging tool, in recent years, Africa's mobile innovation has been among the most extraordinary — and exciting — trends in global development.

If Apple had a more substantial presence on the African market, it'd be a serious boon to Africa's ambitious, tech-savvy youth. At $1.43 billion, not only is the iPhone application market lucrative, but given its low barriers to entry, for budding entrepreneurs and programmers, it's especially fertile ground to till.

Back in the 1980s, Apple declared that at some point soon, there'd be two kinds of people — those who used ordinary devices, and those who used Apple. I'd guess that when it comes to the latter, the company wasn't solely dreaming of the kinds of consumers parodied on websites like "Lonely People with iPads." Africa is a continent poised for economic expansion, and it's time for Jobs to "think different." Again.

Photo Credit: spencer e holtaway

Te-Ping Chen Te-Ping Chen is a freelance writer and U.S. Truman Scholar whose writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the South China Morning Post magazine, Le Soir, and Slate.com.
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