This insightful op-ed was contributed to TechCabal by Emeka Ajene. Emeka Ajene co-founded Gozem alongside Raphael Dana in 2018.
While the African continent is often discussed as a single united entity, it’s important to remember that markets are far from monolithic. One relatively staid way to develop an understanding of African consumers across markets is to look at summary market statistics. But a more engaging and somewhat uncommon way to glean insights into consumer behaviour and preferences is to explore app analytics data.
In June 2020 the article “Africa’s most popular apps & the insights they reveal” did just that. In it, I extracted insights about internet users across the African continent based on an examination of Google Play Store’s leaderboards compiled by mobile analytics firm App Annie (now Data.ai).
Two years later, it’s worthwhile to revisit that analysis and see what’s changed, what’s stayed the same, and what we can learn.
What’s changed
The return to normalcy. The previous analysis was conducted in June 2020 in the throes of the pandemic; at that time, Zoom was a top-3 app in the US and the UK and a top-5 app in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana. Zoom’s share price reached an all-time high closing price of $568.34 on October 19, 2020, and two years later, the stock is down to ~$109. Similarly, the Zoom app has fallen to 19th place on the US free app leaderboard, and it no longer ranks among the top 20 free apps in the UK or in any African country.
MSMEs are big business. WhatsApp Business, the messaging app designed for small business owners, is increasingly important as a commerce-enabling tool across African markets (which are characterised by, among other things, high levels of informality). The app is now the top free Play Store app in Morocco, the number 2 app in Ghana, and the number 6 app in Nigeria. Even in South Africa, which has one of the lowest levels of informality on the continent, WhatsApp Business is now among the top 20 apps.
Global trends are African trends, too. Across all African countries examined in the 2020 analysis, WhatsApp held the number 1 ranking. Two years later, the Meta-owned messaging service, while still laying claim to a dominant position, no longer reigns absolutely. Social video-sharing app TikTok, which reached 1 billion global monthly active users (MAUs) in about half the time it took WhatsApp to achieve the same feat, is now more popular than WhatsApp in Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, and Egypt.
Credit: Financial Times
The current reality
Today, 10 apps are extremely popular across the African markets examined: South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco. These include:
- global social media apps (i.e., TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram),
- messaging apps (i.e., WhatsApp, WhatsApp Business, and Telegram),
- NYSE-listed Jumia’s e-commerce app, and
- apps addressing issues with specific relevance to African markets (i.e., caller ID and spam call blocking app Truecaller and offline file transfer app Xender).
Below is a chart displaying the ranking of these ten apps on their respective country’s top-20 leaderboard. (A red encircled “X” appears for apps that are not ranked among the top 20 free Google Play Store apps in their country.)
General observations
The snapshot of the top 20 free Google Play apps in the 6 African countries surveyed is below. (The US and UK leaderboards are included for comparison.)
According to various researchers, the main use of smartphones is to stay in touch and communicate with friends, family, and colleagues. As such it’s not surprising that social media and communications apps like TikTok, WhatsApp, and Snapchat are popular both in the West and across African markets.
Smartphones help us meet a variety of other needs, however, and exploring how they are used in other markets is revelatory.
For example, one can say, speaking quite broadly, that a primary goal of the average Android user in the US is to entertain him/herself as the category containing the largest number of apps in America—6 of the top 20—is gaming. Similarly, 5 of the top 20 free Android apps in the UK are gaming apps. In North Africa, the picture is similar; it can be said that mobile gaming is rather important to the average Egyptian and Moroccan Android user today.
But in sub-Saharan Africa, things are quite different. Instead of games, the goal of the average Nigerian Android user seems to be to access financial services. The same is true of Kenyans (although there’s a particular focus on access to loans in the country). Notably, financial services apps make up a quarter of the top-20 list in both countries.
In South Africa however, users tend to download free Android apps not to play games or to access financial services, but rather to order goods & services and perform a variety of commercial transactions.
Ghana, on the other hand, over-indexes on communications. In addition to traditional apps that appear on other countries’ leaderboards like WhatsApp and Facebook, Ghanaian users also enjoy social networking app MORE (number 4) and MTN’s messaging and communications app Ayoba (number 15). Unlike South Africa’s strong affinity for commerce apps, Kenya’s affinity for lending apps, or Morocco’s affinity for gaming apps, Ghanaians have no immediately apparent dominant affinity (aside from social networking and communications apps).
Let’s dig deeper.
Key themes by vertical.
Financial services/fintech
In the US, payment-platform-cum-neobank Cash App is the only finance app in the top 20, while the UK sees the Chase Bank app as the number 1 overall app and Google Pay as #19. Similarly in South Africa, financial services apps are sparse among the top 20—the Capitec Bank app is the only traditional financial services app to make the country’s leaderboard, but South African retailer Shoprite offers a fee-free mobile banking app that is the number 2 app in the country.
In Nigeria, however, 5 apps are among the top 20: neobank Kuda Bank (which was recently valued at $500 million during its 2021 Series B fundraise), financial super apps PalmPay and OPay, and digital lending platforms LCredit and OKash. Access to diversified financial services seems to play a significant role in Nigeria’s digital landscape today.
In Kenya, financial services are similarly important—5 such apps are among the country’s top 20—but they are much more concentrated in lending. Three digital lending platforms (Creditmoja, Tala, FairKash) are in the top 10, and there’s another lending platform on the top 20 leaderboard: Absa Bank’s loan-focused Timiza. Most of the country’s lending apps are enabled by M-Pesa which itself is the 5th financial services app in the country’s top 20.
While Kenya has sometimes been touted internationally as Africa’s fintech hub, thanks to M-Pesa’s success, perhaps today it’s more specifically Africa’s digital loan hub. In fact, in addition to the 4 lending platforms on the country’s top 20 leaderboard, there are 6 other digital lending platforms ranked between number 21 and number 30.
Credit: Financial TImes
In Ghana, there are just 2 financial services apps in the top 20: 4Cedi and MetaLending, both digital loan platforms.
And in Egypt and Morocco, there are zero financial services apps among the top 20. Perhaps this is unsurprising as citizens of both countries are some of the most cash-dependent on the continent, with only 33% of Egyptians and 29% of Moroccans over the age of 15 holding bank accounts, according to World Bank data.
Commerce
Aside from enabling digital interactions with friends and family and access to financial services, one important use case for smartphones is enabling online commerce.
In the US, three of the top 20 free Android apps are large e-commerce platforms: Amazon, Alibaba, and Shein. Amazon and Shein also appear in the top 20 free Android apps in the UK, along with Vinted (a platform to buy and sell second-hand clothing) and Too Good to Go (a platform that allows users to buy unsold food from restaurants and merchants that have surplus quantities).
In South Africa, 4 of the top 20 apps enable different forms of commerce: online retail platforms Shein and Takealot, food delivery platform UberEats, and on-demand transportation app Bolt.
In Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana, the only app in the commerce category that makes the top twenty leaderboards is Jumia. In Egypt, Jumia shares that distinction with Amazon, and in Morocco, it shares it with kids’ & women’s clothes shopping app Chicpoint.
Streaming, gaming, and religion
Aside from communicating with loved ones via messaging and social media, accessing financial services, and buying goods and services online, another major use case of smartphones is for entertainment.
As discussed earlier, in the US, the UK, Egypt, and Morocco, this primarily takes the form of gaming when one looks at the Android free app leaderboards—mobile gaming apps make up at least a quarter of the top 20 apps in each of these countries. However, in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana, there are zero mobile gaming apps in the top 20 free apps.
On the contrary, in Kenya, there seems to be a strong affinity for streaming-based entertainment—Netflix, Spotify, Boomplay, and MyDSTV all appear among the top 20 apps in the country. Similarly, South African smartphone entertainment also seems to be led by streaming. Disney+ is the number 1 app in the country; and Spotify (number 24) and Netflix (number 30) also hold spots in the top 30.
In Nigeria, music platform Audiomack is a top-10 app in Nigeria while Boomplay (number 24), Spotify (number 25), and Netflix (number 27) are just outside the top 20. And in Ghana, Audiomack is a top-10 app with Boomplay (number 21) just outside the top twenty.
Another form of entertainment worth mentioning is reading, and the Bible seems popular among certain segments of African users. In Kenya, the King James Bible app is number 2 in the country, while it’s number 12 in Ghana, and number 16 in Nigeria. Perhaps this is unsurprising, as according to the Pew Research Center, Christians in sub-Saharan Africa are some of the most committed worldwide.
Credit: Pew Research Center. “Levels of religious salience are particularly high in sub-Saharan Africa: Over 75% in every country surveyed in the region say religion is very important to them.”
Final Word
“The reality in Africa is that if you really want to scale today, you need to run a hybrid strategy, meaning digital and part physical.” — Timothy Nuy, Finclusion Founder & CEO
While startup founders, operators, and investors across Africa must recognise the limitations of a purely digital strategy given certain characteristics of African markets today, it’s equally important to gain a deep understanding of the African users who are currently online.
While there’s no substitute for on-the-ground visits, one creative way to glean insights at a distance is to analyse expressed consumer preferences and behaviour as indicated by app leaderboards. As the analysis above hopefully demonstrates, examining a country’s app usage patterns can uncover hidden consumer insights that aid market understanding.
Ultimately, as more and more Africans come online, ventures—both on the continent and abroad—that target online audiences across North and sub-Saharan Africa would do well to study users’ changing app preferences and the underlying insights they reveal.
Emeka Ajene has nearly a decade of diverse experience across the African startup ecosystem as a founder, operator, angel investor, strategic advisor, mentor, speaker, and writer. His background includes leading teams at Uber and Konga in Nigeria and co-founding francophone Africa-focused super app Gozem. He writes regularly at Afridigest where a version of this post first appeared. Follow him on Twitter @eajene.
