Ayoba, MTN’s instant messaging platform hits a million-user mark
MTN’s instant messaging product Ayoba has reached the milestone of one million monthly active users, the leading African telecom group disclosed, recently.
Ayoba is an innovative communications application that has been localised by the telecom giant for African and Middle Eastern consumers under an Over-The-Top (OTT) brand with unique features created exclusively for MTN subscribers. The app supports a list of local languages spoken across the MTN markets, including isiXhosa, isiZulu, Yoruba, Pidgin, Hausa, Swahili, English and French.
While disclosing the million users mark, the company’s CEO, Rob Shuter said that MTN’s subscribers in Africa and the Middle East deserve a messaging platform that expresses their unique voice, honours their vibrant identity through the local languages, and addresses the subscribers’ specific challenges and needs by offering a data-included offering for MTN users, locally relevant content via channels and mobile money transfers which will be coming soon.
Rolled out earlier this year, the platform is now available in South Africa, Cameroun, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Congo Brazzaville, Afghanistan and Guinea Bissau.
According to an online platform, www.iol.co.za, MTN plans to extend the platform to the rest of its markets as well as other territories across the globe, including Guinea Conakry, Rwanda, Liberia and Benin before the end of the year.
It would be recalled that Ayoba is a South African slang, which means something “cool”, “okay”, or “all right”; and that the app was named after a campaign by MTN in South Africa to commemorate the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
Just like WhatsApp, customers need to register with their phone numbers to access their contacts. In addition, they don’t need to create a new address book to connect with their contacts. All they need to do is sign up with their phone numbers to sync all their contacts easily. Customers can then make calls directly to their contacts.
To make calls to a contact, all a customer needs to do is click on the contact and the app will redirect to their phone call application or Truecaller, depending on the phone call app they use.
It should, however, be noted that for every call made customers will be charged using their airtime minutes. Using the app, whether they’re MTN subscribers or not, customers will need data to send and receive messages, audio files, video files, images, and documents to their contacts.
Customers can also send messages to other contacts that don’t have the app; these messages will be delivered as texts, and if there are images or files attached, the messages will include links to view them in their browser. And, to keep data safe and ensure privacy, MTN claims that the app has an end-to-end encryption.
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