Its been sometime since I did a decent blog post so I’m pretty happy to finally post something that is reasonably new (i.e. meaning a couple of weeks late!). As anyone will tell you who knows me, I am super passionate about mobile as a marketing and service delivery channel. More specifically, I am talking about the mobile web and more recently mobile apps as they proliferate the mobile world, as we know it. Its one of the reasons why I was so attracted to joining Dealfish from day one, now over a year ago (which actually seems to feel like such a short time since I have been so very busy building the business in East Africa).

Dealfish was designed at launch to work on both feature (basic) mobile phones as well as smartphones across Africa. This was, and, is still quite prescient as a good number of web sites in Africa are yet to be mobile enabled. However, this trend is slowly changing as some African countries have statistics that show over 50% of their mobile subscribers go online via the mobile web, almost exclusively. Therefore, from this perspective, it was only a matter of time before we took a step further at Dealfish and developed a mobile app to keep the pace with the emerging “MobileFirst” trend that is engulfing the dark continent (aka Africa).

A couple of week ago, Dealfish quietly launched its very first mobile app on Google’s Android Market. The Dealfish Android mobile app was developed over several months and I am quite pleased to say it works pretty well. This is our first stab at deploying a mobile app and as such its still very much a work-in-progress. I am particularly proud that most of the work done in building the app was actually done right here in Nairobi which goes to show the depth and breadth of mobile application developers we have in East Africa. In addition, we are already working on version 1.1 of the Dealfish Android App.

The way the Dealfish Android mobile app has been designed to work is so that you have access to most of the features and functionality that you currently get on both our PC and mobile web sites. However, the experience goes a step further in making access to content and services on Dealfish faster and more user-friendly for the Android user. In addition, there are additional features we are going to introduce in the next release but unfortunately I cannot go into specifics here, at least not just yet. However, I have tested it on Huawei’s entry-level IDEOS, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7, Galaxy Mini and Galaxy s2 devices – in all cases, it works flawlessly.

At launch, the Dealfish Android mobile app is only available for listings on our Kenya and Nigeria web sites. We plan to expand these listings to include our other countries in due course. We would love to hear your comments on it. You can download the Dealfish Android mobile app here>