Asia Life

There’s an App For That (in Myanmar)

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Asia Life

There’s an App For That (in Myanmar)

Emerging from years of censorship to capitalize on growing demand for local apps, developers jump straight to mobile.

There’s an App For That (in Myanmar)

In a local market in Yangon, Myanmar, a vendor using her smartphone.

Credit: MICKIE.K / Shutterstock.com

In 2004, the same year Facebook was launched by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates, an 18-year-old in Yangon was hard at work on Myanmar’s first smartphone app. Their lives couldn’t have been more different. While Silicon Valley was already awash in cash and glamor, Myanmar’s military junta was restricting access to the web. All but a few pages were blocked.

Luckily for Htoo Myint Naung, that didn’t include the developers’ section of Microsoft’s website. He used his father’s sluggish dial-up connection to load the pages and, eventually, MySM, or My Short Message, which allowed users to text in Burmese, was born. More than four thousand people downloaded it — a vast portion of the people who owned a smartphone at the time, he said.

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