The continuous flow of new emerging technologies has made our lives easier and more efficient than ever before. Technology has become ubiquitous, and you can find new digital innovations in every corner of the world. While the main goal of technology is generally to make our lives more comfortable, there are global differences in how this can be achieved. As a result, innovation is driven by a country’s local and regional consumer behavior. One example of this is the “super app,” which has become a standard for technological innovation in Asia in recent years. In this blog, we dive a little deeper into these super apps to find out how they are transforming technology in Asia and even on a global scale.
What is this so-called super app?
So what are we talking about when we talk about so-called “super apps”? The term was first coined by Blackberry founder Mike Lazaridis in 2010, when mobile apps were just making their way into our smartphones and daily lives. More recently, they have gained immense popularity in countries like China, Korea, and other Asia-Pacific countries. Mike explained the purpose of these super apps as follows:
“A closed ecosystem of many applications that people instagram data would use every day because they offer such a seamless, integrated, contextualized and efficient experience.” - Mike Lazaridis, founder of Blackberry
In other words, a super app is an app that provides a complete suite of services that are usually found in separate apps. Think, for example, of ride-hailing apps like Uber, food ordering apps like Takeaway, and social apps like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. A super app integrates all of these functionalities into a single app, consisting of mini-programs that connect users to a third-party service provider. In this sense, a super app acts as a one-stop portal for a wide range of services. Examples of some of the biggest super apps at the moment include WeChat and AliPay in China, Paytm in India, Grab in Singapore and Malaysia, GoTo in Indonesia, Zalo in Vietnam, and Kakao in South Korea.
The birth of super apps
You might wonder why super apps have such a following in Asian countries and haven’t caught on in the West. In the West, our smartphones are still filled with a wide variety of apps that serve a different purpose, rather than one that does it all. This difference lies in the fact that the East has not experienced the same digitalization process as the West. The West was exposed to the first computers, the emergence of the internet, and the process of our cell phones becoming smartphones. This has led to incremental improvements and a plethora of technological innovations and solutions along the way.
In the East, this process not only happened much later than in the West, but also skipped some steps. While the West had time to grow along with its technological advances, the East has largely jumped into the digital age. Therefore, the Eastern market has a much more 'mobile-first' approach. This rapid digital transformation in a country as large as China has resulted in the accelerated production of affordable smartphones. After all, the Chinese population had to transform along with the market, so it was crucial to make smartphones widely available and affordable. To do this economically and efficiently, Chinese smartphones usually do not have a lot of storage space, or at least not compared to the flagship products of popular brands like iPhone or Samsung. This has severely limited the number of apps that users can install on their phones. Therefore, super apps formed a good solution.