Safaricom through Nzioka Waita, the Director of Corporate Relations has announced in a panel during the Mobile Web East Africa event that they will have a mobile apps store up later this year. Nzioka noted that Android has contributed much to adoption of the smartphone and providing value to Safaricom services, mainly the use of data services. This has led to their decision to being biased more towards android platform apps as their main support on the application store.
This should be in line with the existing Safaricom Academy based in Strathmore University that trains mobile apps developers on Android development. The Academy has already graduated the first lot and is underway to training the second group. The course is a Master of Science in Telecommunication Innovation and Development and runs one year.
In the same breath, Nzioka announced that Safaricom wont be opening up the Mpesa API but will find a way to give access to Mpesa to developers by June this year, so devs, the ball will be in your court in a few!
