Mxit

» see mxit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Mxit started in 2005 in Stellenbosch as a side project that came out of a failed mobile game called Arya. Herman Heunis, the founder, had noticed that South African teenagers were spending money they did not have on per-message SMS pricing. Mxit ran on a thin Java app that fit on the cheap Nokia and Sony Ericsson feature phones that filled the country at the time. It used GPRS data instead of SMS. The cost difference was an order of magnitude. A kid who could not afford twenty SMS a day could afford to chat all afternoon on Mxit.

The product caught fire fast. By 2007 Naspers, the South African media conglomerate that already owned a chunk of Tencent, took a 30 percent stake. By 2011 a second buyer, World of Avatar, took the whole company. Peak usage came in July 2013 with 7.4 million monthly active users globally. Of those, 6.3 million were inside South Africa. Mxit at that point was effectively the social layer of the country's youth. Schools had Mxit policies and newspapers wrote weekly explainers about what the slang meant. Government agencies even ran HIV-awareness chat lines through it.

The decline arrived through the same channel as the rise. WhatsApp and BlackBerry Messenger started running on the same feature-phone tier Mxit had owned, then on the smartphones replacing them. WhatsApp had global reach and a single-app habit that traveled across borders. Mxit had a feature-set built for slow phones in one country. By 2014 the user base was visibly shrinking. In October 2015 the company announced it would shut down and donate the intellectual property to The Reach Trust, a youth-focused charity. The actual lights went out in September 2016.

i never used mxit. it was a south africa specific product running on a price tier my phone bills did not match, and i was already on msn and then on whatsapp inside turkey. mxit was one of those things i learned about later from africa-focused tech writing, where it gets remembered as the most successful regional messenger of the pre-whatsapp era and the clearest example of what a cheap-data chat app could do for a country before global apps caught up.

~ the case file ~

~ the feature-phone bet ~

Mxit's design choice was the whole story of its rise. In 2005 the smartphone was not the dominant device anywhere outside Japan. Across most of the world the phone in a teenager's pocket was a low-cost Java handset with a tiny screen and a camera that nobody used much. Most chat apps at the time were either desktop-bound (MSN, Yahoo) or BlackBerry-bound (BBM). Mxit made the bet that Africa would not skip the feature-phone era and instead live inside it for a decade. That was correct. By the time the smartphone wave actually arrived in the late 2010s, the phones it replaced had run Mxit for years.

~ the youth-platform problem ~

Being the place every South African teenager hung out in 2010 came with the same problems Habbo or MSN groups faced elsewhere. Predators showed up and press cycles about "Mxit dangers" ran every few months. The company invested in moderation tools and partnered with NGOs on awareness campaigns. It got tagged as both a national institution and a moral hazard at the same time. The Reach Trust handover in 2015 was partly a way to extract the youth-engagement know-how from the dying commercial product and keep using it inside a charity context.

~ what whatsapp took ~

The fight between Mxit and WhatsApp was not a feature war. It was a substrate war. WhatsApp won by being the chat app on every smartphone everywhere, which meant a South African user with a new Android device had no friction adding international family contacts who already had it. Mxit was a single-country app on a single-class device. When the device class went away, the app went away with it. This is the same shape of failure that took out BBM and several Asian regional messengers in the same window. The era of country-specific chat habits ended inside about three years.

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