Young Award-winning Nigerian App Developer, Ajibola Aiyedogbon is challenging telcos in Africa to break out of their comfort zone and reach out for greater data revenue by supporting local app developers to grow. In an exclusive interview with Adom News Editor Nii Narku Dowuona, at the just ended West and Central AfricaCom Conference in Dakar, the award-winning “MyCash” app developer said the telcos seemed to be in their comfort zone, and were unwilling to work with the local app developers to explore bigger markets in the area of creating app stores for local applications. His remark was in line with a call from young app developers for telcos to open up their billing system and allow the app developers to bill users of their apps by themselves, instead of the current situation where the telcos billed users, took the lion’s share of the revenue and gave the app developers peanuts. “It seems they are comfortable with what they have and are not willing to do more – they are comfortable with the situation where we the app developers sell our apps to them for cheap and also use their infrastructure to advertise the app and pay them for that, then they also get the lion’s share of the revenue generated from the use of the apps,” he said. Ajibola, who has been touted as Nigeria’s Mark Zukerberg, therefore challenged the telcos to experiment with the request of the app developers and open up their API’s (application programming interfaces) for up to two years, and if it did not work they could close it. “I think they should take it like an experiment and try it out for two years and if it is not working they can shut it down, [but] I’m sure in less than a year we would have like 200% growth in local applications and that would generate higher revenue for the telcos as well,” he said. He said in Nigeria, Glo and Etisalat, for instance, were ‘racing’ to open virtual app stores of sorts, but they were both doing it ‘wrongly’ because they had stocked those stores with apps from overseas, which were not relevant to the greater majority of Nigerians and that was a total disconnect from the local people. “What we are asking them to do is to open app stores stocked with local apps and not apps from the USA and from the West,” he said. Asked if he did not think that demand would place one too many financial burdens on the telcos, who had, at the same conference, complained of the multiple and arbitrary taxes, heavy fines, plus the huge investments they are required by law to make in Africa, Ajibola said “they are big so they should expect pressure from every angle.” Ajibola noted that the reason the telcos flocked to Africa was because they saw the prospects of profitability in Africa, adding that it was the same reason they (the developers) were asking the telcos to foster an ecosystem that would bring them the revenue they hoped for and also encourage young app developers in Africa. “The huge investments into infrastructure that the telcos talk about is not important because the opportunity to make back their money is there, particularly with the huge prospects in data consumption growth on the continent,” he said. He said while they were asking the telcos to review the ecosystem and make room for greater revenue and fairer revenue share, “we are also looking at other business models and opportunities through which we are benefitting from the apps we develop – so we are not entirely waiting on the telcos.” The young app developer however kicked against regulators playing into the business relationship between telcos and app developers, saying it would kill any leveraging opportunities for the telcos and that would have defeated the purpose of the ecosystem they (the app developers) were asking for. Ajibola is the developer of the Nokia award-winning “MyCash” application, which helps users keep tabs on how much money they spend daily, and allows them to clearly see at a glance how their money was spent in a given day.