Mxit - The Rise and Fall

Bradley Prior

Bradley Prior

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Mxit - The Rise and Fall

South Africa once had its own locally-built messaging app that was installed on millions of phones across the country. It was named Mxit.

Just a few years after its popularity skyrocketed, however, the service was dead; South Africans had moved to apps served from overseas providers.
 
CEO Francois Swart argued that Mxit had 88 million registered users globally and that its monthly local active users in January 2015 alone were more than 2.7 million.

Despite this, Mxit announced in October 2015 that it was shutting down commercial operations and donating all of its intellectual property and technology assets to The Reach Trust.
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Lol, just gotta love it when CEOs try to BS!
 
For anybody in the know, why the heck didn't they make a version for smartphones back then, until it was too late? Did they assume the typical user was 'too poor' to get a smartphone on contract/cash?
 
Okty said:
For anybody in the know, why the heck didn't they make a version for smartphones back then, until it was too late? Did they assume the typical user was 'too poor' to get a smartphone on contract/cash?
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It's the management decision that single-handedly guaranteed Mxit's downfall. I very clearly remember people moving to WhatsApp due to the technical superiority of the platform, even when switching costs were present.

If Mxit provided a Telegram-like alternative to WhatsApp, from before WhatsApp hit our shores, chances aren't bad that Mxit could have held onto SA as the largest chat app. But then maybe that was always impossible, given Mxit's obsession with monetisation on the platform.

In the final years of Mxit's life, it was hilarious what a piece of junk their platform was compared to all the competition. Woeful leadership lead to that.
 
I think the reason why mxit failed against WhatsApp is because WhatsApp added people automatically by looking at your phonebook. mxit wanted us to add nicknames and so did bbm, but i really think it was the phonebook integration which was the big attraction.
 
It was fun times starting this! I recall the devs working on Mxit was part of Clockspeed, by that time they were making mobile games but we started toying with the idea of launching a Jabber client that was preconfigured to talk to our server. I already had a Java MIDP Jabber client called Colibri and used it to connect to other Jabber servers. One of the infrastructure guys then setup a Jabber server at Clockspeed and we started using that.

From there on I did not have much to do with it all and they carried on developing it. My Nokia 7250i was the first phone that support sockets so that was "borrowed" a lot to test the socket server VS the normal polling one that was in use for sometime.

The one thing I did build for Mxit was the Trivia Game, it took a good couple of months but in the end it was up and running and I still recall adding a lot of staff and their families to the "free player" list just so they can go on Trivit and challenge other players to duels.

Much later when Mxit launched it's official 3rd party API I changed Trivit to Quizzit making use of the new API. I also added a Math game using the same engine but instead of having a database of questions it randomly made math questions and added it to a queue ready to be served to the player.

That code is probably still around somewhere, might see if I can get it up and running on a more modern chat platform.
 
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