Bid or Buy app imminent on Android

The Bid or Buy app for iPhone was released in South Africa, in December 2011 and received more than 3,000 downloads over its first weekend of launch.

“It’s all about the minimum clicks to get the maximum cut,” says Tim Bishop, Chief Technical Officer and founder of Prezence.

Bishop explains although mobile Internet use is vastly different from web use, statistics show no decrease in web users despite an increase in mobile Internet users.

Prezence has launched a number of very successful apps since 2007. He showed the audience how the apps evolved together with the development of higher technology mobile devices. The company mostly develops apps for big companies and adapts the features to specific devices for maximum use capacity.

Among their customers are companies Ster Kinekor, who has benefitted from online mobile app solutions. One of their recent successes is the iPhone Native, boasting 10,000 downloads within one day of launching.

Africa’s mobile stats still differ widely from the global trend, according to Bishop’s presentation. The sales number of apps in Africa is still dominated by BlackBerry with 65 percent, followed by Nokia with 22 percent, Android with 9 percent and iPhone reflecting 4 percent. These contrast with the statistics in worldwide sales where Android leads with 56% and BlackBerry sits at 7 percent.

Bishop said people should stop giving all the credit to the United States. “South Africa is awesome,” he told the audience at this week’s Africa App seminar at AfricaCom 2012 in Cape Town. Bishop spoke on “Launching apps for all platforms into South Africa and beyond”.

“Prezence develops customised integrated profiling tools and solutions that allow brands to instantly monitor product popularity, shortfalls, drive sales and communicate, whilst significantly reducing costs (both monetary and user-drop-off) in producing direct communication that has direct relevance to the user,” according to the company’s website.