BlackBerry has been proven, many times over, to be one of the most significant smartphones in Africa. The company can boast of more users on the continent than any other smartphone manufacturer, and with such high levels of adoption, comes an equally active app store.
While it is not of the size and scale of Android’s Google Play or Apple’s App Store, BlackBerry’s App World is stocked with an array of useful apps. With BlackBerry being used by a large number of business executives on the continent, many of the apps available on the App Store are business focused.
Using the Nigerian market as a base example, IT News Africa has put together some of the best apps designed to make doing business in this thriving market a breeze.
1. EssentialApp
When free-to-download EssentialApp was released, it was developed exclusively for BlackBerry users in Nigeria. The app provides access to lifestyle information and is integrated with SMS. A second version of the app saw the inclusion of a business directory search backed by 100 000 companies in the database, integration with BlackBerry Messenger, and a localized ‘Like’ function. It provides flight schedules, forex rates, and SMS to Radio amongst others.
Jobfetcher is a simple app that provides a link to millions of jobs found on thousands of employer career portals, recruiter websites, job boards and other employment sites in Nigeria. Jobfetcher is designed to make searching for a job easier and does this by making jobs more accessible and search results more relevant for the user.
“You can think of Jobfetcher as the ‘online job shelf of job info’. We’ve subscribed to thousands of sources to provide by the minute Job updates. We are not a destination per se. Ultimately our goal is to enhance your online job hunt by displaying jobs from sources that you’re already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn’t know existed and putting them side-by-side for comparison,” reads an explanation offered on the BlackBerry App store.
Having a business is one thing, but finding the right property to conduct that business in is a completely different matter. CroxleyOnline is a Real Estate management system for agents and owners who intend to sell or lease property, developed by CroxleyOnline Nigeria. The app features a Referral number box during registration, the date of each listing, the ability to print property descriptions in a sequential format, has a country filter and also features a State Filter – and Lagos state has a sub filter for different parts of the city.
Keeping an eye on the world stock exchanges is important to top business executives. With the Nigerian Stocks app, users will only be one click away from important market information. The app allows users to track stocks quoted on the Nigerian Stock exchange, see a daily list of the top 10 gainers and losers, view a full price list and see detailed quotes at a glance or drill in for more details and moving averages. The app also provides relevant news about daily and weekly market activity.
5. Jandus Radio
Strictly speaking not a business app, but what would a business be without a little bit of entertainment? The Jandus Radio mobile app for BlackBerry is a radio streaming service which prides itself on bringing together Afrohiphop music from stations like Truspot, GidiLounge, Afrijamz, AfriRythms, FortisRadio, NigerianWebRadio, NigerianHiphop.net in one app. The app features 10 stations from Nigeria, 12 stations from Jamaica, as well as stations from Guyana, Namibia, Ghana, Guinea, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor
