Introducing pesaDroid

Back in 2008, during the post election crisis, Mr. Felix Kiptum found himself stuck at home. It was not possible to travel anywhere, and even airtime was running into short supply. Given the prospect of a few weeks of nothing else to do, he thought he should find something constructive to do. He started working on what in August 2011 would become pesaDroid.

Because there was no airtime, Mr. Kiptum did not have access to the internet. The J2ME platform was the rage, so he learnt how to develop a midlet using very little reference material. By the end of the week, he had an application that could do something similar to what pesaDroid can do today - and then the roads opened up and he was able to travel to Nairobi.

As soon as he arrived at the city, he went online and found a rude shock awaiting him. The SMS messages inbox the j2me platform were referring to were not the same as the inbox in your phone. It would not be possible to build a MIDlet that can read a general SMS. To read any SMS, one needed to have a port number and ordinary SMS messages do not have such. It took a while for this to sink in. Hence this blog post dated May, 2008

Enter the Android platform. This platform makes it possible to access many of the features that had previously been restricted in j2me.

Openvestor is proud to introduce this app to MPESA users - let us make the best of this platform.