The power of mobile has really captured my imagination. My head is still buzzing with statistics from my research: the world has reached almost as many mobile phone subscriptions as people on the planet. Phones have leapfrogged so many technologies in the developing world because they are so cheap and yet so powerful. They are changing the way we interact, the way we pay for services, how we make plans; it’s an incredibly exciting field and all this has happened for the most part in the past 20 years. Internet has had almost the same timeline and yet only reaches 35% of the world
Internet is catching up though. In the developing world we have big computers and laptops to access the internet, but in the developing world most people just have their phones, often just the simpler feature ones to access the internet. In Nepal, although the country is only at 27% internet penetration, five years ago that number was 2%. More importantly, over 90% of people with internet accessed it through their phones. The potential of phones to positively transform the developing world is staggering. And developers will need to adapt if they want to aid and harness this power.
Designing for mobile requires a major change in the way we design user interfaces and display content. There are extra challenges when developing for more basic phones which do not have any standard hardware, operating systems or method of delivering software. Working for Equal Access, an organization that has really impacted the lives of thousands of people around the globe simply by putting information in their hands, has opened my eyes to the possibilities. are becoming ubiquitous even in hard to reach areas and that gives them the potential to deliver so much information. This is why my senior design project is about delivering training to mobile phones in the most accessible way possible, through texting.
In my interactions with communities in Nepal it was already evident how impactful phones with internet were. The urban community we surveyed indeed seemed to be going through what my generation went through in America; unsupervised access to a vast database of knowledge which would answer questions with judgement. In these cities there was the notion that almost everyone was getting these phones. They’re already reaching out for information on their own and it could be enormously transformative to reach out to them through a mobile platform or just make the platform better.
Since coming back from this project, when talking to companies, I’ve been looking for jobs that will keep me working with mobile phones. My best bet is probably an iPhone or Android developer for the immediate future, but my fantasy is to find a position where I can still develop for underprivileged communities. In America there are communities who interact through the web primarily or exclusively through their phone as well, such as homeless populations who can benefit greatly from apps or sms apps that target them.
If I do work for a big company after school, which seems likely, I will be sure to take every opportunity I can to volunteer. I’ve already been discovering some of the opportunities to participate in hackathons for non-profits, and of course contributing to open source projects. I also can’t quite imagine dropping the idea of the untapped potential in developing markets. The is so much more I want to learn about the potential and what I can do to help it grow. The future will be mobile and I want to be a part of it.