This is the one app your phone truly needs right now

fuad lawal

November 20, 2017 4:15 PM

The new Jumia One app is currently on beta, and i' promises to be the Swiss Army knife of apps.

When you want to download an app, you are silently asking yourself a bunch of questions; is this app even useful? Do I have enough memory for this app on my phone? Does it burn through my data?

Well, the Jumia One app seems to be answering all these questions. It wants to be the App of all Apps.

Basically, it’s an app that has other services linked or integrated inside it. So you can buy airtime or pay utility bills. You can buy stuff and make bookings, as it integrates seamlessly with the Jumia Mall and Jumia Travel respectively. And Social Media? Yep, it’s available, although it appears that they are currently available as web versions.

What’s the grand plan?

While this app is currently in Beta testing, and we might not have a clear view of what Jumia has planned for this app, it’s not so hard to tell what the company stands to gain by building this app.

First of all, when you trust an app to be the only one on your phone, that app has created a value system; one that can be converted to sales.

Jumia currently has all of its services listed in this app, in more functional ways. So at the place where it says Find & Book, the options available are things like Hotel, Flights, Food. These are in fact Jumia products, like Jumia Travel and Jumia Food.

So when you’re scrolling down the app to quickly request for an Uber, you just might make a quick stop at the shopping option to see what’s available to buy.

So one interesting thing here for Jumia, is not the app itself, but how long it keeps you jumping from one service on the app to another, without ever really leaving the app.

Although a bunch of the links available on the app redirect to the web pages of the actual apps or websites, when you hit the return button, you’re back on the Jumia app.

It’d be very interesting to see the long term plans Jumia has for this app, and when we reached out to Kushal Dutta, the MD of Jumia One, he assured us that he’ll be sharing interesting details about it when the hard launch is about to go down.

While we wait, you can download the beta version of the app, and give it a spin. I’m almost certain it will be worth your time.

fuad lawal