The failure of many BlackBerry users in Nigeria to update the operating system of their devices was a major setback for music app spinlet, according to the company’s chief marketing officer.
Mark Redguard told HumanIPO many of the Spinlet apps brought to Nigeria in 2011 were not working on older BlackBerry operating systems.
“When we first came to Nigeria in 2011, the idea was to come in with Android, BlackBerry and so on. We brought those into the market just to see whether the consumers respond well,” he said.
“But we realised that was on the BlackBerry side, a lot of consumers never updated their BlackBerry operating system, so their devices were still operating on the old BlackBerry OS.”
Redguard said that locked Spinlet out of a significant proportion of the market, saying their Finnish developers were unaware of the culture of not upgrading and forced to develop a number of previous editions, which took some time.
According to him, they had to perfect their products in order to ensure Nigerian consumers have the best experience.
“In the interim, we decided to perfect what we have in order to enhance customer experience, and that’s what we’ve been working on – perfecting the app for the Nigerian market,” he said.
He also revealed the company is trying to ensure portability across devices by developing various versions of the app for different operating systems such as Java and Symbian, as well as for desktop. He however noted the app will be focusing more on smartphones in the short term.
“We want to be in the mass market, but we are starting with smartphones,” he said.
