A Data-Free Super-App, By Update Notice
On June 22, 2026, Safaricom pushed Android version 5.1.9 and iOS version 5.1.7 of My OneApp — the super-app that now handles M-Pesa, mobile top-ups, and home internet management for its customers — and quietly made the app fully zero-rated. Opening and using My OneApp no longer draws down a user's data bundle, though an active connection is still required to launch it (Techweez, June 22, 2026). The app has grown fast since its April 2026 rollout: 4.7 million registered users, 1.3 million daily active users, and Safaricom is now steering customers away from the legacy M-Pesa and MySafaricom apps toward this single platform (AllAfrica, June 29, 2026).
There was no public consultation, no regulatory filing, and no press statement addressed to the question that matters for tech policy: is it fine for a dominant carrier to make its own app free to use while every competing app — a rival mobile-money service, a competing messaging platform, a news site — still costs data? Kenya's Communications Authority (CA) has never issued a rule that answers that question either way.
Permitted, Never Regulated
Zero-rating is not new in Kenya. Safaricom has offered Wikipedia Zero for years, and Airtel has zero-rated WhatsApp and Facebook access, practices researchers at Strathmore University's Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (CIPIT) flagged more than five years ago as operating in a legal vacuum: Kenya has no statute specifically addressing zero-rating's effects on competition or expression, despite constitutional protections for freedom of expression under Article 33(1)(a) (CIPIT, "Zero Rating of the Internet and its Impact on Net Neutrality").
That gap persists. The CA's own list of sector regulations shows no net neutrality or zero-rating instrument — only general-purpose rules like the Consumer Protection Regulations, 2010, and the Fair Competition and Equality of Treatment Regulations, 2010 (CA, Sector Regulations). The latter is the closest thing Kenya has to a non-discrimination principle for telecoms: Regulation 11(1) requires that "all licensees shall provide uniform, non-preferential service on a first-come-first-served basis to all persons within a covered geographical area or a given class who request for such service," subject to exemptions for ability-to-pay and legitimate business/residential classifications (Kenya Law, LN 29/2010). Nothing in that text was written with app-level data pricing in mind, and the CA has never applied it to a zero-rating decision.
Steelmanning the Case for a Rule
The concern deserves a fair hearing before dismissal. My OneApp is not a neutral utility — it is Safaricom's own commercial product, bundling the company's M-Pesa payments rail, telecom account management, and (per the same June update) home-internet controls into one app that a subscriber can now use at zero marginal data cost. A rival mobile-money app, a competing fintech, or an independent news outlet trying to reach the same subscriber still has to clear the cost of data. When the operator that controls the network also zero-rates its own vertically integrated app, it can tilt usage toward itself simply by pricing, not merit — the textbook self-preferencing concern that antitrust regulators worldwide now treat seriously. India's telecom regulator banned differential data pricing outright in 2016 under the Prohibition of Discriminatory Tariffs for Data Services Regulations, precisely to stop Facebook's Free Basics from becoming a gatekeeper to the wider internet. Kenyan net-policy voices, including KICTANet's think tank, have made the parallel argument domestically: once one operator zero-rates, rivals feel forced to match, and the market drifts toward de facto discrimination without anyone ever voting on it.
Why a Ban Would Overreach
But My OneApp is a materially different animal from Free Basics, and Kenya should resist importing India's blunt instrument. Facebook's product curated access to a bundle of third-party websites and explicitly positioned itself as a subsidized on-ramp to "the internet" — the gatekeeping harm was that Facebook, not users, decided which of the wider web counted as free. My OneApp does the opposite: it zero-rates exactly one company's own first-party account-management tool, not a curated slice of the open web. A Safaricom customer who wants to browse Twitter, use a rival wallet, or read this article still pays ordinary data rates and makes that choice unencumbered by My OneApp's zero rating. The app isn't a walled garden; it's a free customer-service counter.
There is also a real consumer-welfare case for it. Kenya's mobile data costs remain a genuine barrier for lower-income users, and a large share of My OneApp's traffic — checking an M-Pesa balance, reversing a wrong transaction, paying a bill — is exactly the kind of low-margin, high-frequency task that should not cost data in the first place. Treating that the same as a discriminatory bundle invites regulatory overreach that raises compliance costs across the sector for a problem that, on the facts of this specific update, does not yet exist.
The Actual Gap
What Kenya lacks isn't a ban — it's clarity. The CA should issue a short guidance note distinguishing single-operator, first-party zero-rating (like My OneApp) from third-party curated bundling (like Free Basics), and confirm that Regulation 11(1)'s equal-treatment principle can be invoked if a dominant operator's self-preferencing crosses from customer service into anti-competitive foreclosure. That would give Airtel or a fintech competitor an actual regulatory hook if My OneApp's zero-rating ever expands into something more than account management — and it would let Safaricom keep doing something genuinely useful for low-income subscribers without operating in permanent ambiguity. Silence is not the same as a policy, and Kenya's digital-payments market is too important to regulate by accident.