(A column highlighting scientific, technological, engineering, and design innovation in Africa)
Imagine two teenage coders taking on Google Chrome, Google Inc.’s free web browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. That’s exactly what Nigerian brothers Anesi and Osine Ikhianosime did when they built a mobile, Android-based web browser.
Anesi, 16, and Osine, 14, developed Crocodile Browser Lite in 2014 to create a faster mobile web browsing experience than Google Chrome’s. Crocodile Browser Lite is now available for free on the Google Play Store, where it has seen nearly 3,000 downloads to date. Osine and Anesi initially launched the mobile browser on the Mobango app store before moving to Google Play Store. They are now looking to get ads.
The self-taught brothers, who hail from Lagos, wanted to create a browser that would work faster on low-end phones typically used in the developing world, and that didn’t use lots of memory on devices. They offer Crocodile Browser through their newly launched technology company, BluDoors, which focuses on making useful technology.
“Anesi had a low-end phone a while back and he found Google Chrome really unreliable and quite unstable. We were on mid-term break and we were bored so we decided to solve our own problem realizing that other people may also be having the same problem, and Crocodile Browser was born to cater for the low-end phones and high-end phones,” Osine tells AfricaStrictlyBusiness in an exclusive interview. “After developing the browser for a few months, we realized that the browser had so much potential and we thought we could really scale the app with a few improvements, so we continued working on it. It took us approximately nine months to develop Crocodile Browser.”
Not bad for a couple of self-taught coders. Osine got interested in computers at the age of 7 and the two brothers decided to learn to code at ages 12 and 14. According to Anesi, he started coding in 2013 and taught himself with such sites as Code Academy and Code Avengers and books like Android for Game Development and Games for Dummies. Says Osine, “We used free online resources and lots of books to learn how to code.”
The boys’ mother, Ngozi Ikhianosime, a math teacher, told Pulse magazine, “Osine could already use a PC before he could read, at age 3.” She also said that the school the boys attended, Greensprings Schools, also got them interested in coding. It also helped that they had laptops at home. Their father, Philip Ikhianosime, who is the head of management services and human resource manager at an insurance company, also encouraged their interest in programming.
Now, the brothers have dreams for attending Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But for the present, they are thinking ahead to their next creation and also tweaks to their Crocodile Browser Lite. “We will make some design tweaks and some new features we can’t reveal at the moment,” teases Osine. “We are also working on Project CrocChat, which is our communication project that will be focused on user interaction.”
