MXit users want games, gossip, entertainment [Survey]

MXit users care about having fun, hooking up, and getting the latest celebrity gossip. That’s according to a new survey, conducted with the aim of figuring out what apps — besides games — users of the instant messaging service most want.

The survey was run by software development company Maxxor, whose online gaming division develops a number of games for MXit. It used this gaming population as the basis of the study.

Head of Online Games at Maxxor, Adrian Frielinghaus, claims that the 30-question survey was incredibly comprehensive given that “almost 30 000 people” completed it and that their responses “offered us some unique insights”.

Aside from the revelation that MXit users care less for serious apps than fun, entertaining ones, the survey also found that they don’t particularly mind paying for apps. There is, however, a caveat. People using the social instant messenger will only pay for apps that give them exactly what they want.

Frielinghaus claims that Mxit’s trademark virtual currency, called “Moolah”, is behind their willingness to pay.

“MXit has spent years carefully grooming its users to buy virtual goods with virtual currency,” he says, “This is made even easier by allowing them to easily convert their airtime into virtual MXit currency.”

The majority of people who answered the survey reportedly own Samsung and Nokia handsets, although some 11% of the respondents own BlackBerrys.

Maxxor claims that this “flies in the face of some speculation that rapid BBM growth in the teen and youth market has been detrimental to the MXit platform.”

This willingness among young people to use MXit on their smartphones, the software development companys adds, should be “encouraging news” for developers looking to take the smartphone route “because MXit provides an ideal way to get an app to the front of the mass market queue”.

The survey also found that 75% of respondents access the web at least once a day from their mobile phones. Maxxor claims that this means “Software developers need to realise that MXit is now part and parcel of a greater internet experience for mobile phone users”.