The Google Ecosystem in Sub-Saharan Africa is in existent.
When was the last time you walked into a shop in Lagos and found official google products on sale? Did i just say last time? Have you ever seen a google store in Nigeria? the answer is never. never!
According to Global Stat Counter, Android has 82.79% of the mobile phone market share in Africa while IOS has a measly 12.56%. However these statistics do not indicate a Google dominance in Africa per se, with smartphone manufacturers like Samsung, HTC, LG, Tecno, Infinix and quite recently new players like Xiaomi, Huawei all vying for dominance in the huge thriving African markets.
To get a Google product, you’ll have to buy them from retailers like Jumia who slap on extra fees on these products thus driving up the prices thus alienating consumers looking to have the stock android experience.
Even getting your hands on Google Services in Africa is nearly impossible. I have used Android since 2013 and i remain a die-hard fanboy of the Operation System but every time i get a new phone i instinctively disable all Google Apps with the seldom exclusion of the Playstore because most of the services are hardly optimized to function appropriately here or function at all.
Apple users have Apple Music which provides music on subscription to it’s users while the Google play music app’s streaming capabilities are disabled here, it’ll surprise you to know that orange music player you never use can actually stream music.
Did you know Google Messages has a “chat” feature that behaves just like Apple Messages but it isn’t available to people outside the USA and some select countries? what use is a chat app when no one you want to chat with uses it? that’s Just like having WhatsApp in China for pete’s sake Google!
The beauty of Android however is the fact that we can install third party applications to solve these problems but having a stock app to do these things will surely help Google with their bid to become a major player in the phone manufacturing sphere, a battle they will lose if things to not change for the better.
