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The Strange Nature of the Nigerian App Market

zacharye writes "With 100 million mobile subscribers, Nigeria stands among leading mobile markets in the world. Its mobile content sector is quite fascinating — this is a market where $100 apps can debut at the No.3 position on Apple's list of top iOS apps. Bible and Quran apps are a major feature of the Nigerian mobile content market. The evergreen 'Message Bible' was launched globally in December 2009 at almost the same time as 'Angry Birds.' While the raging avians achieved greater global success, 'Message Bible' was a smash in Nigeria, recently returning again to No.15 among the top grossing iPhone apps. In the United States, the app didn't even crack the top 600 at its peak."

8 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. No surprise there by Wizard052 · · Score: 5, Informative

    As Africa's most populous country, it's got millions of mobile subscribers. This is one prime market that's often overlooked as the West focuses on the BRIC markets...

    1. Re:No surprise there by William+Robinson · · Score: 5, Informative

      Just checked and surprised to see India has 929 million mobile subscribers. That is huge market.

    2. Re:No surprise there by Sqr(twg) · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And with a GDP per capita of approximately USD 2 600 (a twentieth of the US) very few of those can afford to pay for apps. The fact that the “CFA Exam Audio Series: Level II 2013 priced at $100 placed #3 gives a hint as to how many Nigerians are buying apps.

  2. Aint no fool by Penurious+Penguin · · Score: 5, Funny

    How do I know this article isn't a Nigerian scam? I aint clickin' on that link, no sir I aint.

    --
    Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
  3. Re:Africa by quenda · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's also interesting to see how Africa in general seems to be steadily rising towards a more developed continent.

    Surely you must be talking about plate tectonics there.

  4. Re:Faith of Nigeria by pr0nbot · · Score: 4, Funny

    Those non-Christians aren't going to last long in hell... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslin

  5. Re:Message bible? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That is not correct, though that's a common misconception. The Council of Nicaea did not address the question of which books would be included in the Biblical canon. Rather, it concerned the nature of the relationship between God the Father and his son Jesus--it was a dispute between the followers of Athanasius who finally won out, who asserted that they were different persons, and the followers of Arius, who believed that God and the Son were separate entities. It was, of course, a political struggle, and that particular council was not the final word on the matter. There were messy struggles between the two factions (and several others that cropped up over the years) until the Emperor Theodosius I settled the question essentially by fiat near the end of the 4th century. (It was officially settled by council--but strangely enough, the results of the later councils always seemed to match the theological opinion of the reigning Augustus.)

    The books that were taken to be part of the canon were largely settled somewhat earlier by consensus between the "orthodox" Christians--the ones that finally won out. Groups of Christians that disagreed were disenfranchised and exiled before the Council of Nicaea, as a result of the legal battles that ensued after the Edict of Milan legalized Christianity. At that time, the courts had to settle which groups were the actual Christians, and thus officially tolerated, and which were the churches of the false Christians that did not fall under the Edict's orders to restore seized property.

    There were no Ecumenical Councils that took a position on the canon until the Council of Trent asserted the canonicity of the so-called "deuterocanonical" books--books in the Old Testament which the new Protestants rejected. The Protestants, of course, continued to reject those books, and so most Protestant Bibles fail to include books like Tobit and 1 and 2 Maccabees.

  6. Re:419 Scam? by icebraining · · Score: 4, Informative

    I (and Carlin) said Religion, not the Bible. If you think that churches are teaching the Bible, you're sorely mistaken.

    More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

    http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/09/28/130191248/atheists-and-agnostics-know-more-about-bible-than-religious