The millennials today spend a lot of their time on digital devices such as smartphones in order to meet their daily needs. They install and use several apps that include cab booking, food delivery services, and many others. Also, for any kind of questions or doubts they have, they first pick up their phones to find them using the search engines. Therefore, apps are the 1^st & foremost solutions to every issue people come across today.

Users look for apps that would help them in meeting their needs effortlessly, whether it is for shopping, healthcare, payments, audio, etc. and tech giants are working on newer ways to cement a huge market share of this overall digital revenue aggressively, since the global app sector is proliferating every day. Hence, the “super app” was born.

Although there is no common definition for super apps yet, Blackberry’s founder defined it in 2010. “A super app is a closed ecosystem of many apps that people would use every day because they offer such a seamless, integrated, contextualized and efficient experience.”

These are a type of marketplace of services & offerings, gathered under a single umbrella, whether in-house or 3rd-party ones, & the most popular ones are WeChat, Alipay, etc.

Benefits

A super app is a mobile application rendering several services through a single app. Let us compare a super app to a shopping mall in order to gain a better understanding. A shopping mall offers both retail spaces to other businesses & shops to sell their services & products as well.

Apart from the ability to offer customers over 100 offerings in a single app, super apps also provide additional benefits such as meeting customers within their preferred digital premises, securing a loyal customer base, saving the customers’ phone memory space, gathering a wealth of user data, saving customers time & effort in the long run & simplifying their internet usage.

Factors behind the rise of super apps

Some of the changes that have influenced the increase of super apps include:

App saturation

While the App Store possesses 1.96 million apps currently, the Google Play store possesses 2.87 million apps and therefore this shows that consumers are not suffering from a lack of choice however there arises a question of whether all this diversity is useful to them. There is a standalone app for everything but seventy-one percent of app users churn within ninety days of installation. The average consumer is not obtaining sufficient value from these apps that are ignored. Hence the only solution to this is not more apps, but different apps.

Competitive landscape

Competitive pressures in the continent have led to creating a niche for the planet’s 1st super apps & huge platforms such as Google, Facebook, & YouTube are blocked in numerous countries. Although these giant companies dominate Western markets, their absence has opened a gap for innovation in Asia. Therefore, this competitive landscape in the Western countries has diverse factors which are slowly leading enterprises to converge on super apps.

Can only big brands develop/create a super app?

Super app development needs a huge fund investment, invest a lot of time, good infrastructure, several customers & resources when compared to a simple app. Big brands are well-equipped with all the necessary resources, as it will be easier for them to handle such complex projects. But what about small businesses & startups? How will their journey begin toward a successful super app?

To begin, startups & small businesses can insert a few additional services into their app’s offering or add 3rd-party APIs to their platforms and later on, they can build their service platforms & integrate them within the app.

Super apps’ must-haves

User base: startups would not have the required customer base for populating a super app. If this is the case for you, start by building your base & making it wider-reaching.

Capital: since super apps combine a lot of separate offerings in a single app, organizations should be ready with funding/investments in order to meet any requirement that arises.

Expert Resources: if an organization is planning something significant, & cannot compromise when it comes to talent, then it has to hire experienced & skilled teams for its super app project.

Infrastructure: after recruiting the best teams for super app project development, the business requires a top-tier working environment, and investing in the perfect platforms & tech solutions for enabling them to do their jobs is possible.

A considerable amount of Time: for developing a successful super app, organizations require a considerable amount of time and if they do not have sufficient time for funneling into the project now, then it will not be worth investing in at this time.

The future of super apps

This is just the beginning! The future of super apps is bright and organizations have to be well-prepared before commencing on their super app journey. The super app approach is not only proliferating globally but investors, as well as users, are inclining to multi-functional platform use. This not only increases the value propositions for investors but also users benefit from the flexibility & ease of service as well.