Agony of an African programmer

My family on my fiancee's side is from South Africa and I regularly travel back and forth between South Africa and the US. Whenever I'm there I try to line the trips up with tech conferences and/or local meetup groups. South Africa has a strong tech community that is doing really interesting things.

The thing that surprised me was that on my last trip I found out that one of my fiancee's family members is a investor in a startup. This guy is not very tech savvy, but even he could see the possibilities. Does the community still have a ways to go, yes. But with that being said I do think they will get there.

Also, the stuff happening in Cape Town is really exciting.

1) sharing data between apps is near-impossible, unless format converters are written (they never are) and explicit manual steps are taken.

2) linking between apps is impossible (e.g. you configure an address for a client then click/tap on it to navigate to said client when the application is not made by microsoft).

3) searching across apps is impossible. You can't just go to google.com, type in what you remember and have it show you the app.

4) native apps are expensive, because they never have a huge market (compared to online apps).

5) native apps are really badly supported.

6) you can't give anyone else access to your data (easily, just look at how long it took microsoft's army of developers to give office some semblance of real sharing. And it's still not up to par).

7) anyone you want to give access to a doc now has to buy your (expensive) mobile app.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you are forgetting quite a few facts here. Native apps are usually self-contained, small, unmaintained things. Yes, that does have some advantages, but it also has large disadvantages.

I would even agree with the "ads are good for you" argument to some extent : these companies are "spying" on you in order to attempt to create (theoretically) win-win economic transactions. Essentially they show you stuff you want, in order to make you want to buy/have/rent/... it. That is good for you (you get "value" in the economic sense), the other side gets some money, and a small "tax" is paid to the intermediary. Economic activity goes up, and it becomes easier to get a job, ... etc. Of course this argument only holds for pay-for-transaction ads (ie. not for banner ads, not for things like facebook, essentially only for google's model).

Other than that, I think you are mostly confusing cause and effect - none of those are results of technical limitations of "native apps" per se, but rather an effect of the marketing push towards "the cloud". After all, Firefox is a "native app" - as you might have noticed, it's an "expensive small, unmaintained and badly supported thing with very few users".

Electricity was reliable only between 11PM to 5AM and we spent New year's eve in the dark.

My data provider had a special 3G plan where you get 1Gb data between 12AM and 6AM for $1. This worked well for the first 2 weeks only then connection became non-existent. The only thing the provider had to say was "sorry but we don't have coverage in your area."

Yet I met some brilliant folks who would make amazing programmers if only they had access to all the resources we get with reliable internet and electricity. I spoke with many of them about starting a computer club where we meet weekly, share ideas and learn from each other. Some were kin but many were skeptical because they're used to unkept promises.

Edit: Forgot to mention that the state has installed fiber optic in some parts the capital city but nobody wants to use it because they know the government will abuse it and extort millions from users. And the country's ccTLD .cd is still one of the most expensive in the world.