The world’s fastest growing and biggest social giant, Facebook has today announced on it’s blog that 100 million Africans are actively using it’s platform. It can be recalled that the company recently sent some Facebook engineers here in Africa to do some tests on their Android App. This trip lead to the tweaking of their Android app to solve the slow loading of the app, due to the low-end phones that are commonly used here that lack memory and often result in repeated crashes.
The current figure of 100 million falls short by half of the estimated Internet users in Africa, which is still at 200 million people. The Facecook engineers discovered that at least 80% of Facebook users are accessing the site from a mobile phone, and tweaking their Android App to address this population was paramount. Indeed their work was not in vain, as the huge numbers of people accessing the Internet on mobile devices in high-growth areas comes as many use their mobile phones not just to communicate, but as a lifeline for banking, employment and other necessary services.
Rob Norman, chief digital officer of media buying firm Global Group M, said in a blog post on Monday that services, such as Facebook, need to deliver maximum use for the smallest amount of data.
“In Africa, we are seeing explosive growth and incredible momentum across the region. At the same time, when you look at the staggering cost of connectivity in many countries, mobile services need to deliver maximum utility on the biggest range of devices and consume the smallest amount of data, which is exactly what Facebook provides,”
