2022 MTN Business App of the Year Awards winners revealed

Pictured from Left to Right: Nomsa Chabeli from MTN, Arthur Khosa from Shoprite SA and Kholofelo Magagane from MTN | image supplied

The winners per category are:

• Best South African Solution - Eyerus, an app with an exclusively South African flavour and purpose that enables users to indicate how safe or unsafe they feel in their current surroundings through the use of four safety status modes.
• Best Consumer Solution – 22seven, a consumer-centric app that makes the everyday lives of ordinary people more accessible and more convenient by helping users to manage their money better.
• Best Incubated Solution – Sponsored by Tshimologong Precinct, this category awards an app created and built by an individual or team currently being developed by an accelerator or incubator hub. The winner is LayUp Payments app, which transforms a business’s lay-by book into a one-centralised digital payment platform.
• Best Enterprise Solution – A local business app that is specifically targeted to solving business challenges, called My Smart City.
• Best Hackathon Solution –YabiSaba, an app developed by the entrant that produced the best app as a result of participating in the MTN Business App Academy and the hackathon. It’s a booking platform that helps digital nomads to discover live-and-work yacht co-working spaces around the world.
• Best Gaming Solution – A hotly contested category that is open to mobile, PC and console platforms or the use of gamification was won by Recess, which takes the e-learning experience to the next level by making exam preparation social, fun and visual.
• Best Health Solution – Sponsored by Sentech, this year’s winner, for its support of health and wellness, is Buzzer Community Safety, an app developed to keep communities safe and connected.
• Best Agricultural Solution – Sponsored by Tshikululu Social Investments, the award focuses on solving the growing agricultural challenges and capacity building in Africa. This year’s winner is Axl, an online equipment rental platform designed to facilitate the convenient hiring of equipment.
• Best Educational Solution – Awarded to a solution that focuses on solving the education challenges in Africa, Recess won for taking the e-learning experience to the next level by making exam preparation social, fun and visual.
• Best Campus Cup Solution – Notes, an educational solution that allows students to share their study material with their peers. This category is awarded to a college or university student, or team, that designs the most outstanding app.
• Best African Solution – Open to all app developers and coders from the continent, the winner is Appy Saúde, an online platform that aggregates the stock information of hundreds of pharmacies.
• Best Breakthrough Developer – This award is given to a new up-and-coming, or garage developer, and this year’s winner is Chillers Market, an application that allows South Africans to buy and sell in a convenient and secure way.
• People’s Choice Award – Voted for by the public, this year’s winner is Koer, the world's first Afrikaans mobile dating app.
• Best Financial Solution – Awarded to locally developed applications that are focused specifically on the financial services sector, this year’s winner, Franc, is making investment easy and accessible.
• Most Innovative Solution – Sponsored by Idemia, this award went to Shoprite SA, for its disruptive app that is first-to-market that offers banking to South Africans.
• Best Huawei App Gallery Category – This category, which is reserved for apps developed for the Huawei App Gallery, that is HMS compatible or have integrated an HMS toolkit, was awarded to Homii, an app that allows users to stay in the heart of the city, feel the pulse of the people and be part of the Homii community.

The grand prize-winning app – the MTN Business App of the Year – and the winner of R1m in prize money, is the Shoprite App.

“This year, the MTN Business App of the Year Awards attracted just over 1,000 entries – with many of the entered apps focused on solving societal and business problems. We congratulate all our winners and wish them well with their future endeavours. We look forward to a day, very soon, when our lesser-known winning apps become household names due to their positive and lasting impact on businesses and consumers into the future,” says Kholofelo Magagane, head of marketing at MTN Business.