Safaricom has rarely lacked ambition. What it has occasionally lacked, and what its latest product move exposes with uncomfortable clarity, is discipline at the point where strategy meets lived user experience.
The launch of M-PESA My OneApp should have been a defining moment not just for Safaricom, but for the broader trajectory of African fintech. Instead, it arrives as a case study in a familiar but costly pattern, a company that understands exactly where the market is going, builds the right infrastructure to get there, but stumbles in the final, most visible layer, the product itself.
There is no debate about the strategic logic. Consolidating the legacy M-PESA and MySafaricom apps into a single interface is not merely sensible, it is overdue. For years, the fragmentation has been an irritant that contradicted Safaricom’s positioning as a technology company rather than a telco. The idea of a unified, AI-assisted platform that brings together payments, connectivity, commerce, and services is aligned with global best practice and local reality in equal measure.
At scale, M-PESA is not just a payments tool. It is economic infrastructure. With tens of millions of users, trillions in transaction value, and deep integration into everyday life, it behaves more like a national utility than a commercial product. That status raises the bar for execution. When you redesign something that sits this close to people’s financial survival, you do not get the luxury of iterative inconvenience.
This is where OneApp falters.
The most telling failure is not technical, although the crashes, latency, and timeouts are significant. It is philosophical. The onboarding experience, which forces re registration and in some cases restricts access to Safaricom data, signals a product built around internal constraints rather than user continuity. The wiping of saved favourites and frequents is not a bug, it is a breach of trust. It disregards years of accumulated behavioural data that users rely on for speed and accuracy in financial transactions.
In mature product ecosystems, upgrades are invisible in the ways that matter most. Data persists. Habits are respected. Transitions are communicated. What Safaricom delivered instead feels like a reset disguised as an upgrade.
That distinction is critical.
The company is not operating in a monopoly vacuum anymore. The steady rise of Airtel Money, alongside broader shifts in pricing sensitivity and consumer expectations, means that friction now has competitive consequences. Market share erosion from above ninety seven per cent to the high eighties is not noise. It is signal. It reflects a customer base that is increasingly willing to question long standing defaults.
Against that backdrop, forcing users to purchase Safaricom data to access a financial app is more than a technical decision. It is a strategic misread of customer sentiment in a price sensitive market. It reinforces the perception of lock in at a time when the company should be actively dismantling it through superior experience.
What makes this more frustrating is that the hard part has already been done.
Safaricom’s Fintech 2.0 upgrade, with its cloud native, microservices architecture and significantly expanded transaction throughput, is world class by any reasonable standard. The company has also cultivated one of the most robust developer ecosystems on the continent through its Daraja APIs. These are not trivial assets. They are the foundation upon which genuinely transformative products can be built.
OneApp, in its current state, does not yet reflect the quality of that foundation.
The comparison to global super apps is inevitable, but it needs to be precise. Platforms like WeChat or Grab succeed not because they offer everything, but because they orchestrate complexity with intelligence. They reduce cognitive load. They anticipate intent. They make breadth feel simple.
OneApp, by contrast, leans towards visual and functional density without sufficient prioritisation. The mini app marketplace, while conceptually strong, risks becoming a catalogue rather than a curated experience. Discovery without guidance is not empowerment, it is friction.
The deeper issue, then, is not whether Safaricom understands the super app playbook. It clearly does. The issue is whether it is applying rigorous, user centred design principles in translating that playbook into a Kenyan context.
The answer, at least on day one, is no.
That said, it would be analytically lazy to dismiss OneApp as a failure. It is not. It is an incomplete execution of a fundamentally correct idea. The distinction matters because the path to redemption is clear, and entirely within Safaricom’s capability.
First, continuity must be restored. Data migration, especially for favourites and frequents, should be treated as an emergency priority. Second, access constraints tied to network usage must be removed or abstracted in ways that do not impose cost on the user. Third, performance stability needs to match the promises of the underlying infrastructure, immediately and consistently.
Equally important is communication. A platform of this scale cannot evolve through silent updates. Users need context, expectation setting, and reassurance. The absence of proactive communication around such a significant change suggests an organisational blind spot that extends beyond engineering into customer engagement.
If Safaricom addresses these issues with urgency, OneApp still has a credible path to becoming the most important consumer technology platform in Kenya. The ingredients are already in place, scale, infrastructure, ecosystem, and brand trust. Few companies globally get to start from that position.
However, if the company treats this launch as “good enough” and relies on inertia to carry adoption, it risks accelerating the very competitive pressures it is trying to outpace.
The central tension is simple. M-PESA My OneApp represents the future Safaricom wants. Its current execution reflects habits it should have outgrown.
Bridging that gap will determine whether this is remembered as a temporary stumble on the way to platform dominance, or the moment when a market leader revealed the limits of its product culture.
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