Peter Lockhart, product strategist and business developer at mobile-to-mobile social network 2go, has said designing for feature phones is “very difficult”.
Lockhart told the Scale Conference in Cape Towncreating an application for 2G feature phones is “a very difficult development environment.”
This is because “you need to create it for a wide variety of phones, intense resource constraints on the handset, you need to keep the costs low [and] poor quality networks,” said Lockhart.
2go was founded by Alan Wolff and Ashley Peter in 2007 and to date has achieved 10 million active users across Africa with a stronghold in South Africa and Nigeria and an increasing footprint in Kenya.
It records 30,000 new registrations every day.
Lockhart said. “We’re an application, not a mobi site. We build applications for feature phones principally and we’re moving into smartphone realm at the moment with Android and iPhone.
“We essentially provide mobile-to-mobile instant messaging, this incorporates private messaging as well as chat rooms, photo-sharing [and match-ups].
“We particularly appeal to an African market, so we’re looking at emerging markets… and building apps for improving communication for the users.”
