Fast Company:

There are an estimated 40 million smartphone users in Iran. But ongoing government censorship, language barriers, and economic sanctions imposed on the country have made the app ecosystem that’s grown up elsewhere in the world unavailable to most Iranians.

"It’s almost impossible for Iranians to pay for any apps," says Reza Ghazinouri, a program director at the Bay Area human rights organization United for Iran. "Iran’s economy is still isolated from the international economy."

And while isolation has at times been a boon to some Iranian and Iran-focused entrepreneurs—the country’s mostly cash-based economy has even spurred a cash-focused ride-hailing app—access to things like government and health information is still limited, partially due to censorship by the country’s authoritarian regime.

"There are hardly any apps that are civic-minded that are in Persian," says United for Iran’s director, Firuzeh Mahmoudi.

To try to change that, the organization launched what it calls the IranCubator—an incubator that provides funding and support to developers building software to "advance civil society" in the country. It's part of a wider push by developers and nonprofits around the world to create content deliberately aimed at populations underserved by the existing app ecosystem.

This month, the incubator released its first app—a podcast tool called RadiTo, with menus in Farsi, as well as underserved Iranian languages such as Balochi and Kurdish—and plans to deploy additional smartphone software in the coming months...

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