Super apps are proliferating across emerging markets

I've built startups both in the US and in an "emerging market", so I'll offer some of my own answers here.

1. Consumers are less tech-savvy, so having a single app as a starting point makes everything far easier than having to install many apps.

2. Brand is much more valuable. In emerging markets, with (overall) less regulation (and self-regulation) of markets, trust and brand carries a LOT of weight. If I trust company X with my payments, I'm also more likely to trust them with my transportation, my food delivery, etc (than having to verify/trust a new party). Having a trusted brand makes it very easy to expand into new verticals.

3. Regulatory clout. Once you have the scale (or political connections) to navigate regulation in one vertical, it's much easier to apply that to new verticals. You might "know the right people", know how to navigate the bureaucracy better... or in some cases, it's just easier for the government to trust you with a license than someone who's unknown to them.

4. Talent is more sparse, so clustering it in one place tends to make things more efficient.

5. Funding might be hard to come by, but existing companies either already have the cash or have connections to investors.

Overall, these things in combination just make it a lot easier for an existing company to launch a new vertical than for an upstart to do so. With time and as markets evolve, you'd probably expect more specialization to occur, but by then the super apps may already be entrenched enough to defend themselves.

For similar reasons, family-owned conglomerates tend to be very successful in emerging markets and span across a variety of unrelated industries. You just bought a place in a housing development built by a company owned by wealthy family X, then you go to the supermarket to buy some milk but you're not sure which brand to trust... Then you see the carton manufactured by another company from family X.

This article is trying to explain the rise of super-apps in China through the lens of user experience, but I think a more likely explanation is government regulation and platform moderation. In Western markets, Apple and Google use app moderation to forbid apps from doing too many different things at once, so as to preserve their platform advantage. Also, in Western markets, companies that develop apps are wary of developing super-apps because they anticipate exponentially more attention from regulators the more things their app does. In China, Apple was worried they'd be shut out of the market so they ceded some control over the platform by allowing super-apps; Google never had much control over their platform; and regulators are more concerned with protectionism than preventing abuse.

I worked on two super apps for a good part of the last decade; one in India and one in South East Asia so here's my take based on those experience.

As the article points out, most of the are trying to apply the playbook of WeChat. IMO it succeeded because they built an enormous user base which has a terrific daily engagement. Once daily engagement is cracked it becomes not all that hard (but not trivial) to add more use cases. P2P payments, file sharing, and you name it.

However, in India and SEA the companies tried to go the other way. To take Indian example, most of the fintechs in their quest to increase engagement began adding chat. However, by then people had adopted to WA so it miserably failed. But they still kept at it and added more fintech related use cases; to take PayTM as an example one could do just about anything around payments with that. Insurance, toll payments, utility payment, pay to merchant, pay off EMIs, investments and what not. So they did achieve decent daily engagement.

Grab has been trying to do the same. Going from Taxi app to a generic payments app. It's all about engagement.

It's an enormous investment though. Not only about rolling out features but also to build two sided market places (example; merchant payment requires onboarding merchants too), onboarding utilities etc., However the profit from them are minuscule despite good utilisation because the recipient of the payment (like merchant, or utility providers) isn't going to give away their share of money.

So, in the end all the fintechs resort to lending which is the biggest chunk of profit generator. It's a shame that the article doesn't mention it.

I kinda hate how the "across emerging markets" superapps are just the last paragraph and the 98% of the article is about wechat which everyone already knows about. How are those superapps doing in other markets? That would be interesting information.

Rappi. Massive app in Latin America.

The level of usefulness and convenience is astounding. I ordered some items I forgot to get at the supermarket the other day, arrived in 4 minutes. In my home first world country, next day delivery is touted as a massive success by execs on linkedin.

For how powerful Rappi has become, not only did they beat Uber Eats completely out of Colombia (their service just isn't at the same standard anywhere), but they also beat McDonalds who tried to go exclusive with their own app for a year before coming back to the platform.

My question is, how do super apps actually work? On iOS, does the WeChat app actually download an iOS app bundle and execute it? Or does it do something like a browser and execute some kind of markup + interpreted language like JavaScript?

If it’s the former, I thought Apple banned apps in their App Store from doing that. Seems like maybe they made an exception for WeChat..? If so does that exception only exist within China or also in the US?

A different theory:

The ultimate super app is the browser.

The browser is dominant in the west, because we started using the internet with desktop computers, where a website was the ultimate way to reach people.

When mobile started, everyone had to have an app. Surfing the web on mobile at the beginning didn't work that well. At the same time installing apps was a lot easier then on desktop.

In the west, the app model matches the website model. Most popular apps started as websites, later made an app - facebook, youtube ...

In emerging markets, they "skipped" the desktop, started with a smartphone.

Installing apps is still more of a hassle then visiting websites, so a super app makes more sense then a super website.

I hate super apps. It made me appreciate the simple and clean UX of apps developed in the US and Europe.

Nothing worse than opening up Shoppe or Grab and immediately being slammed with 3 dozen icons that you need to scroll through.

Hell, even my banking app looked like that. Select "other requests" and I get to scroll through about 40 different icons for stuff to do. And they just offer banking.

Apps like Grab offer banking, transport, food, digital wallet, etc.

Seems super clunky to me, but what I've been told is the goal is for that app to do "everything" so you never need a different app.

My take after 20+ years in China living with WeChat and Alipay:

1) Green field: no or few incumbents or legacy platforms or regulatory capture to deal with - infrastructure in the West is antiquated and fossilized in comparison.

2) Open to change: People and businesses are living in a world that's extremely cut-throat and dynamic, and so they expect change, and are willing to try new things - the West is more conservative in comparison (e.g., the proliferation of QR code use cases seamlessly bridging offline/online that never took off in the West except when force by CVOID).

3) Free pass from platforms: Due to "be nice to China" Apple has turn a blind eye towards WeChat and Alipay running an app store inside of an app (which has always been against their regulations, and which MANY companies would like to do).

4) Hard work and (used to be) cheaper labor: 996 super-hard work ethic means they churn out features and blitz scale really well - they're just more aggressive.

5) In touch with the offline world: Companies in China have to deal with the reality of an extreme variety of users, from cities to countryside, from young to old, from rich to poor. They often build out big sales and support orgs of people walking around from store to store, across the country, whereas I think many startups in the West (often due to cost reasons) tend to do almost everything online.

And increasingly:

6) Government support. WeChat is pretty much the ERP system of China today. You can do everything through/on it. In some ways it's a utility. I guess every country could benefit enormously in terms of control and efficiency by having an platform that provides authentication, authorization, and payments as a base layer for all other apps. The government puts people / teams / divisions inside of organizations to ensure things are "running smoothly", but this works best if they have a few big companies to deal with - not a myriad of small startups. WeChat and Alipay are becoming more and more nationalized, and are already "too big to fail".

I miss not having WeChat in the West, though I'd of course wish it was done in a less 1984-ish way. Life has ballooned in complexity, and bureaucracy has gotten out of hand in the West... We need a radical streamlining in order to regain back our productivity (and not waste time filling out checks, waiting in line, calling/faxing, filling out forms, etc). Super apps, if done well like in WeChat's case, can offer that .

(I grew up in Europe, spent 20 years in China, and now living in North America.)

My day job just built a WhatsApp bot to interact with customers because our super app was too big for low-end devices. Meta also subsidizes internet for WhatsApp in developing countries, so they don't have to only use the service on wifi.

> Every aspect of a typical Chinese person’s life, not just online but also off is conducted through [this] single app Every aspect of a typical Chinese person’s life, not just online but also off is conducted through [this] single app

What happens to people that get banned from WeChat?

"super app": a browser within an "app" that knows who you are and knows how to move your money around.

The truth is, traditional, western mobile apps really suck, and create a lot of friction. Some of that friction only exists to maintain Apple's and Google's competitive advantages (think web browsers being overly limited), but a large part of it exists because we choose privacy over user convenience.

As I understand it, weChat mini apps have the ability to reliably identify their users and keep their data across multiple devices, with no accounts and no user interaction. Imagine opening an app for recipes, adding a recipe and knowing that it's always going to be there, no matter the device, with no signing up, no figuring out a password, no complicated login screens, nothing. You open an app and it just works.

Same thing extends to payments, Apple Pay and Google Pay aren't terribly popular with users as they require extra steps to set up, and in app purchases have ridiculous fees and can't be used for goods sold outside the app.

The only western system that ever came close was probably Minitel[1], which was just too outdated technologically to survive the age of the modern internet. iCloud would also be a competitor if it worked cross platform.

[1] https://afridigest.com/super-apps-in-emerging-markets/

Great article. Was reading through thinking "okay so why aren't super apps popular in the west?" and lo and behold, they tackle that question brilliantly.

> When users shook their phones in a specific way, they’d be connected to others on the Weixin network who had shaken

Compare that with Whatsapp which want access to your phone number and contacts.

The article (and the embedded NYT video) seem to imply that WeChat is not just a dominant app, but is pretty much the only way to do things in China. For example the quote, "try and pay with cash for lunch, and you’ll look like a luddite."

So, what if you cannot use WeChat? Or if you're banned by their AI (which happens all the time with western apps)? Or if you simply choose not to? There must be other ways to book rides, hire services, pay people, chat, E-mail, and so on.. I (in the West) opt out of using Facebook+all FB properties, Twitter, Google, and so on, and I still have the full ability to live as a normal person. Surely China has cash and the ability to book things over the phone...?

I've missed a career opportunity to lead a super app for the Indian market. I truly regret it of course but I'm thankful at least for the truly enlightening conversations I've had the luck to have, with people having large scale jobsian visions and the means to achieve them.

It reinforced my appreciation for hiring processes, when one can be lucky enough to meet true leaders with exceptional visions.

There have been many attempts to replicate the "super app" phenomenon that is WeChat.

Siri/Alexa are super-apps but with literally zero discoverability of features in their UX.

It'll be fine as long as they write and maintain perfectly secure software and infrastructure, and stay competitively up to date and performant.

WeChat was built in 2-3 months, approved by an email that just read it: “Do it now.”

cc: Patrick C. to add it to that fast project list

Seems the usual HN crowds that are worried of centralization and monopoly praising these super apps. What am I missing?

So, AOL but for apps.

Looks like we got the future before others - clearly it is not evenly distributed.

Hot take: western apps stole the super app concept from Chinese companies specifically wechat.

Hot take2: The proliferation of video and streaming was driven by the Chinese. Who's language is much harder to type on a phone, their app stores this media was exploding and western apps started to copy without really knowing why it was popular.

China presence is significant in emerging markets

Superapps are a deadend if you dont have a huge population like China that is comfortable with centralization.

> emerging markets

Is that all we are to you?

because other apps are too complicated , too greedy, full of popups, and other 'cool things' that techies consider de rigueur these days. Command line interfaces are always the best

Long article that doesn't provide the answer to its own title, but a lot of nonsense.

Wechat is not a super app, it is a browser.

It is popular because China is mobile first, you search within wechat instead of in a browser because the web is not mobile first but apps are.