By Samuel Ansah Boateng
Apple has confirmed Comcent, a locally made mobile application that connects community leaders to their constituents, as the first community media app on the Apple App Store, a significant win for the tech ecosystem in Ghana, Chief Executive Officer of Comcent , Kwadwo Dwomo II , has said.
This move has confirmed Apple’s stance as an equal opportunity company that recognizes innovations, irrespective of the race or gender of the developers.
Apple has stringent requirements when it comes to approving apps for the Apple App Store. According to a Medium article, Apple rejects about 40% of apps that are submitted for approval. This is because of their reputation for better privacy and a good user experience. Comcent is not the first Ghanaian iOS app to be approved by Apple, however, it is the first iOS app developed by a Ghanaian that is branded as the first of a newly-created category that has received approval upon review from Apple, the New Crusading GUIDE has gathered.
The Comcent community media project began in 2018, led by the Company’s CEO, Kwadwo Dwomo II, who also doubles as a student at the University of Ghana, offering BSc. Computer Science and Amir Jamal-Baba as Graphics Designer, Ussher Uthniel as CTO, Fatimatu Mutari as Secretary, and Addo Baffour Dwomoh as CFO.
In an interview with Mr. Dwomo, he expressed “we are very happy that Apple has approved Comcent to be listed on their App Store as the first community media and I am grateful to the Almighty LORD and the team which made this possible. As we were uploading our app to the Apple Store, we were quite anxious whether App Store reviewers will indeed see the amount of thought that went into Comcent and recognize Comcent for the breakthrough software it is’’.
According to him, ‘’When we got the final confirmation from Apple that Comcent has been approved, we were quite ecstatic. Comcent is the first community media because of the new path we have charted towards communication using the internet. In the future, we strongly believe people are going to pay greater attention to communicating online only within their communities so they can directly influence the developments within their community and inspire positive changes across their community.
A significant number of people we have come across have expressed that concern, yet there was no viable technology or method to achieve that objective. Now, with Comcent, everybody who feels the need to make an impact on their community and make life easier for others can do so’’.
‘’We wish people can gradually move away from the culture of social media which was originally built to help friends and family to keep in touch with each other but which has been hijacked by slay queens to search for customers for their sexual innuendos, scammers to find new preys to cheat, and propagandists to spread fake news and incite hate to a new culture of community media where the internet user communicate within their community, not among friends and family.
Far better is that communication among friends should be done on a one-on-one basis and not mass-publicized as currently been done using social media while mass-communication using the internet should happen on community media within a community with a purpose to inspire change within a community’’, he noted.
‘’We have built Comcent in such a way that the conversations that happen on Comcent are unique and productive. We were able to achieve that using a revolutionary method called ‘we’ or ‘our’ method. With this ‘we’ or ‘our’ method, members of the community can get the opportunity to tell leaders the problems that they face within the community.
This is done by letting members begin the title of their post with either ‘we’ or ‘our’ else the post cannot be made. The reason for this is because we wish people to start thinking as a collective rather than the individualistic mindset that social media has engendered for years among people.
Under a certain condition, members can attain a leadership account on Comcent and it will no longer be compulsory for them to start their title with ‘we’ or ‘our’. We are starting first at the tertiary communities, beginning with the University of Ghana community, therefore we will plead with our potential users to await their turn for us to come to their community else they will get locked inside a community they do not belong to and will miss out when we get to their community, unless they send us a message to resolve it.
We wish to make a promise to Ghanaians and the world that with the newly created community media category that Comcent is pioneering, we will work hand-in-hand with all the necessary stakeholders so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the people who pioneered social media but rather use this new community media category to change the course of history for the betterment of everybody living in every community around the world.”
Comcent comes from the shortening of two words: community and center and there will be an official unveiling on the 8th of March 2021’’, Mr. Dwomo hinted.
