Super-apps aren’t new. If you’ve been to Asia, especially China, you’ve probably used one. If not, you’ve undoubtedly heard of them before. The surge of those umbrella apps encompassing a wide range of services is a deep-rooted trend in emerging countries, conquering Southeast Asia as well as Latin America. In those regions, super-apps are a lifestyle. And they seriously affect societies in which they develop. Despite few timid and unsuccessful attempts by Western internet giants, super apps are not part of the landscape today, neither in the US nor in Europe. Will the next decade be marked by the emergence of the super-app model in the West?

One app to rule them all?

But wait… what are we talking about?

Anything anywhere, all from the same place

Originally built for a single service (chat for WeChat, ride-hailing for Grab and Go-Jek, food delivery for Rappi, etc.), super-apps have rapidly developed through the integration of a multitude of unrelated services in a single place, meeting most of people’s daily needs. In China, Tencent’s WeChat is omnipresent: people use it to chat with their families and friends, pay in the street, order food and groceries, book a ride, order plane tickets, pay for their rent, interact with the government and much more.

User satisfaction and stickiness is mainly achieved through the integration of a wallet within the app, enabling users to execute smoothly any transaction though one and only app. On top of the wallet, third parties offer a bunch of services to extend the range of in-house services. WeChat has been the one that has gone the furthest in this direction by launching mini-programs in 2017: the app opened its platform to anyone that want to run its service on WeChat. The platform now boast more than 2 million mini-programs and keeps developing new features to attract developers.

To stand as a one-stop-shop, super-apps need to provide the best UX. This is achieved through the development of an interface with a simple and streamlined design, offering optimized navigation: the idea is to be one click away from anything you want. When we look at any super-app’s dashboard, it reminds us our smartphone’s dashboard in the West. This is the essence of what super apps are currently achieving: the creation of a proprietary OS in the app by the integration of everything you need.