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.
Lippo group[1] is one such conglomerate in Indonesia. During my stint at a company of SEA we partnered with one of their subsidiaries, Ovo. At that time I wasn't aware of Ovo's parent company and the extent of their reach. A visiting exec said that Lippo group has enough businesses to cater to a person from birth to death. Later I found out he wasn't joking, they own hospitals as well as graveyard and everything in between.
Read such an example from early in the COVID-19 pandemic, where a gym tried to bill someone despite rules that such bills had to be suspended during lockdown or something similar.
I think the whole affair with court claim etc. was done over WeChat, I do not recall anything outside of it.
There’s no technical blocker about why this couldn’t be done in Facebook.
Ultimately it’s a governance issue, about how much American/European citizens are comfortable funnelling processes like drivers licenses (or even court cases) through a private entity like Facebook.
I think the constant discussion and investor focus around stuff like "when will we get a super app in the US" is ignoring a lot of these factors that I think are pretty path-dependent. Once you build up the app/services ecosystem one way or another, there's a ton of inertia to overcome vs building this up from scratch in a new market.
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.
> 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.
I’ve never heard about this before. Is this an official policy of either company? Do you have any citations to share for more reading?
It’s part of the more generic “decide of its own destiny” direction Apple has been taking since the new Steve Jobs area.
Apple had a huge problem maneuvering its platform when it was at the mercy of two giant companies: Microsoft and Adobe. Microsoft was in “friendly” terms and tremendously helped save the platform by bringing in IE and Office, but Adobe was a tougher rodeo (TrueType, Carbon, Flash etc.)
That’s in reaction to that history that the iPhone won’t give away the browser setting over its dead body, or competing App store where banned from the start (if it was just for the money, taking a cut of each transactions would be enough…)
Er, do you think that Apple and Google are going to come out and say "half of the point of our respective app stores is to be able to strike down app-based competitors and reave 30% of their take"? It may not have even been Apple and Google's intent to have app stores serve thusly, but it's clear that that's what's happening.
>Do you have any citations to share for more reading?
I suggest the works of Stafford Beer, a cyberneticist known for the quote "the purpose of a system is what it does".
I imagine theey also don’t want to have to deal with these super apps eating up significant resources on their devices, and even ultimately, having to make their devices serviceable (both technically and ideologically ) to one or a few pf these super apps.
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.
Indeed! WA is sitting on a gold mine in India. After a few stop-start and half hearted attempts they seem to be moving in the right direction. They partnered with Reliance Jio (a conglomerate in India) for grocery shopping on WhatsApp[1]. WA has payments through UPI for about 4 years now, though they didn't spend marketing it and kept it under the wraps.
I have worked with one company that competes with Grab in Indonesia, and like you said, it's about daily engagement even at the cost of losing money in some fronts.
Food delivery and ride sharing are not that profitable considering the massive amount of logistics it takes, but wallet payments and the rest of that ecosystem can easily set off that loss.
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.
Can’t think of any super apps that are doing well in India, and that’s a huge market. Our most popular messaging app is Whatsapp that only does messaging. Our most popular payments app is Google Pay that only does payments.
WhatsApp is becoming a super app through the buildout of business messaging. You can now do your shopping in India using the JioMart store on WhatsApp.[1]
Yeah nobody uses that. Payments is super easy to integrate because of UPI but otherwise no one is going to shop on WhatsApp and if WhatsApp gets significantly bloated people will simply move on to TG etc.
Agreed and I never understood why. Apart from the benefit of pushing updates individually to each separate apps, what is the use case of such "bifurcation"?
I wouldn't be able to guess about Cinema vs TV (which would seem to have mostly the same feature set? Although maybe a TV app needs to notify about new episodes) but for other aspects, a combined app does usually mean a larger app, and unless it's a must-have app, larger apps are more likely to get uninstalled when storage is tight and users sort by size to remove. Maybe if you get people to install your TV and your Cinema app, they'll be likely to pick one to keep while cleaning?
Here in Brazil they are not as powerful as WeChat is in China, but they are aggressively growing and pushing the market.
But they are largely a business push force, not a market pull force.
Grab is doing okay I suppose but it feels like "just another app" in SEA, and is mostly used by people for hailing rides. The payments are there but very few vendors actually use it.
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.
Uber Eats has to build a model that works worldwide, including in the US, Canada, UK, EU, etc. where unemployment rates are relatively low. I don’t think same hour delivery will ever be long-term sustainable in a country with low unemployment.
Emerging economies are a different story. Unemployment is usually high so there’s an abundance of workers to power the logistics behind these super apps.
> I don’t think same hour delivery will ever be long-term sustainable in a country with low unemployment.
In Europe we have something called ‘flash orders’, where your groceries are usually delivered within 10 minutes. Way crazier than same-day. Like you said, it does make one wonder if those companies (Gorillas, Flink, Getir) will ever be sustainable long term.
Yeah, these have been around in Asia for years now. The European ones are heavily restricted in items and jack up prices, to make it even remotely profitable.
In India, you can order literally anything - it’s pretty cool. Checkout Dunzo or Grofers. The former even acts as a local courier or task runner.
Oh I am aware, from Indonesia where they have Gojek.
Here in the West I just see it have the same trajectory as Uber. Investors pump in massive amounts of money which allows the service to be sold at a loss, then investors realize they’re not gonna have unicorn returns, at which point the companies jack their rates. And whereas Uber is still a better alternative to what it replaced (the fucked up taxi industry), flash order companies don’t really have that same “I’d rather still use them” boon.
I second this. I use rappi about 1-2 a day. They attracted a bunch of users using their delivery platform and now they have expanded into dug delivery, car insurance, plane tickets and a bunch more. They are currently trying to break into financial services (now really sure how well this last one will play out though).
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?
You can technically hack one together but there's an annoying process of getting verified before you can use the IDE and test something on a phone. You also can't really publish anything and see how it goes without a serious plan and a Chinese national ID. There's a small scene of foreigners contributing to wechat apps and even starting some but ultimately control of the app is through a national.
The Android Wechat app came bundled with a years-old fork of webview, coz the Android scene is a total mess, various vendors not only never update their system apps, but actually substitute it with their custom versions, this made it unusable and a “Chinese Webview” necessary, so wechat got one, all of Tencent's services use it plus plenty of third party apps, since almost every Android 5+ phone has the latest WeChat and their WebView fork.
So this situation almost made their platform mentality an inevitabily, now they only need to define a set of principles for then to be a mobile OS.
I'd say their applet thing can do 99% of the things a standalone app could, but the development speed , reach and functionality you can get is unmatched, best of all, it's the one true unified cross platform OS: on Android, iOS and Windows, but Chinese market only.
They do, in fact, ban web browsers other than Safari.
I know what you're going to say - "Chrome is available for iOS". It's just Safari with a different UI. All the parsing, rendering and javascript runtime code is Safari.
Just to be clear, because apps aren’t allowed to run untrusted code (like random JavaScript in a JIT) via interpreter or compiler, any app that shows web content has to use WebKit-based APIs.
And while WebKit is the HTML and JavaScript engine that Safari uses, browsers on iOS are quite different than Safari.
I often use Brave because I like the UI and it blocks trackers etc. out of the box and certainly has features and UX that’s different than Safari’s.
In my day to day usage, it makes zero difference that Safari and Brave use the same rendering engine on iOS.
To clarify the clarification, there’s a rule on code execution that is only applied selectively. For instead Pythonista of course do execute arbitrary code, as do games running internal code through interpretors etc.
It’s for limited use cases and not a threat to Apple, so it gets a pass.
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.
Agreed, but the browser never got the identity/contacts bit down. So what would be a relatively simple social app when you can rely on your existing social graph becomes much more complicated and loses out on network effects when it has to be its own completely independent site.
Now, I’m not saying we should have this as a centralized app either. The closest and most interesting thing I’ve seen along these lines in a decentralized approach is https://spritely.institute/
Ah yes. Back to the days of Netscape Communicator or AOL.
You can experience this in its modern form (on a Mac or PC) with SeaMonkey or Vivaldi. Arguably Chrome + Sign-in to your Google Account + Gmail and Google Drive would get you there too, although I would never actually sign into Chrome to test that theory.
No, I think you misunderstand me. I don't just mean that the browser contains an email client. I'm replying to a comment pointing out that the browser doesn't support identity and contacts. Email has that and it's an open protocol.
To give you a very narrow example of what it might mean to integrate email into the browser better: Right now, even subscribing to a newsletter is kind of annoying. Type in your email, verify an email you get. If it was integrated better, it might be one click.
Apple seems to be moving directionally towards something that could be an equal to that experience with Passkeys[1] which I’m personally ambivalent about and want to see what problems crop up first before I trust it. I at least want to see reliable passkey migration first since Microsoft and Google are apparently on board too[2].
I agree with this problem but it doesn't refute the point being made. This is just an unfortunate consequence of how history has played out. There is no rule or guiding north star in the open market to "limit closed gardens". This is just a philosophy that a minority of people hold.
It's more than that. A market without competition isn't much of a market. We've got more than a few decades of antitrust law and research, and multiple government agencies, focused on preserving competition.
I agree with this theory somewhat. I also think the browser had the runway to become the ultimate open mobile super app, but dropped the ball. For reasons we may never figure out, the browser never evolved beyond its initial incarnation. A mobile browser today is mostly just tabs that view shrunk down web pages. I am still waiting for a true mobile first web experience. This might even require a new kind of web page format.
> For reasons we may never figure out, the browser never evolved beyond its initial incarnation.
The reason is simple, the 30% app store profits. Very low incentives for either of the 2 major players to improve things, and tens of billions of reasons yearly to slow things down.
You can't blame the app stores or the mobile platforms. The truth is that _anyone_ could re-imagine a web browser and build something brand new and become successful distributing through the store for free.
I'm waiting for a web first mobile experience. I don't think web pages are the problem, mobile operating systems are. They should, fundamentally, just be browsers. The desktop has space enough for two layers of operating systems - "the" operating system, and the browser. But on mobile that's too confusing.
Agreed. Data privacy and security is so important, especially on mobile since it's our wallet, camera, etc that we need the system to help with permissions, data management etc. It is redundant to have a browser layer AND an operating system layer manage these separately.
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.
The other problem with super apps, at least where I am now, is a quarter of the functions don’t work, or work but break the viewport, or work but put the app into an unusable state until you hard reload it.
The more functions there are, the more testing that needs to happen and doesn’t… “in emerging markets”.
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.)
Does 996 yield better results than typical 9-5 work? I can't help but think that at that level of time investment, particularly for knowledge work, you are getting negative marginal benefits on time spent at work.
The 4-day workday movement is testing the opposite hypothesis, and I've heard of a few tech companies testing the waters with e.g. time limited half day fridays (marketed as a post-covid recovery or summer perk). The questions are what they took from the results and whether they'd be willing to be seen to take risks with their biggest cost when the expectation is for a recession.
I think (6) is the quiet but giant reason -- having the "superapp" achieve utility status guarantees adoption and lock-in, and pretty much eliminates competition.
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?
I suspect life gets very difficult. When visiting a supplier in China a few years ago I tried to buy a coffee from the place downstairs and eventually had to get someone from the supplier to do so because they had no method of ordering and paying other than a WeChat app, and as someone without a Chinese bank account I was unable to pay for anything via WeChat.
I had to go to China for 1 week+ for work and was in the same boat. Found a few places that only take WeChat but I ask someone around to pay for me and give them cash. More often than not it would be the person at the register. People are quite helpful if you ask nicely.
You are shut out, and with the latest CCP censorship measures you are forbidden to creat accounts "web-wide".
So I guess you should just keep your mouth shut other than harmonious online activities to avoid that doomsday situation, like me, I never use WeChat or Weibo to do anything other than keeping in basic touch, since you don't know which mundane word would become sensitive, trigger the censors and get you banned, there's no appeal.
I keep a fb account exactly for the same reason. Keeping in touch with friends and family from all over. I'd never post anything because you never know what random s..t gets you banned for life next year.
Probably a worse version of getting banned from the banking system and VISA/Mastercard as well. Go living in the woods becomes a very realistic choice.
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.
I always said that Facebook can innovate in different ways:
1. use their already existing social graph to produce OTHER apps that are useful
2. use their tool with a new social graph
Number 2 has been done once I believe. It's called workplace. Number 1 is what Wechat is doing on steroids, and Facebook has done almost none of that. It's insane that they're not taking advantage of this and are just adding noise to the useful tool that facebook used to be.
You're forgetting that Facebook can see the future and everyone is wearing helmets and gloves and living in a digital world that looks like a mobile game from 2008.
I am finding a lot of small businesses here in the UK are trying out WhatsApp for booking jobs. For example, when I needed a couple of labourers to help me remove some garden waste recently, I received quotes by reaching out on WhatsApp.
The direction of whatsapp was really really biased and strong towards being as simple as possible and useful as a messaging medium. It worked out pretty well fwiw. Who uses wechat besides Chinese people?
Did you really ask "who uses Wechat besides 1.4 billion people" in a model that can be monetised and extremely profitable compared to a simple messaging app?
Wechat is very profitable because users use it for everything, banking, payments, ecc.
The average WhatsApp user is worth nothing in comparison even with almost twice the user base. Last time I gave WhatsApp money was the 50 cent yearly subscription when it was still an independent product.
If something has potential, it's the one that has made billions out of that potential. Unless you think that the Chinese market doesn't matter, only the Western market does.
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.
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...?
COVID measures made WeChat a must have for anyone except toddlers, since you need to show your green COVID qr code to enter public spaces, and almost any Chinese had done one if not daily obligatory mass testing, in which various WeChat applets are required.
You can live perfectly fine without it before, buy you simply can't legally live in China without a working, updated and ready-to-open WeChat now, since last year.
The CCP also did their whole national census on a WeChat applet, it's the defacto governing tool.
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.
I'm not sure about timeline of superapps/in-app-apps though, I ... think mobage(moba-gay not mob-age) for i-mode phones, was one early example of a portal with messaging + apps. LINE replicated that with iOS apps, but more generic apps were only implemented in 2019. Either examples were rather simplistic games only. Bot-based text interfaces similar to various SMS self-serve systems existed for LINE, but I believe those were not offered as apps.
WeChat might have been influenced by those predecessors, but as far as I can see, in-app mini-apps are understood to be a phenomenon originating in China and Southeast Asia, even in Japan. So it might be a stretch to call it a predecessor or pioneer in superapp, more like one of precursors.
I think you are pretty much right on all counts, probably except for the very definition of super-apps. I think the original article used the term for an app that can serve for multiple purposes, not necessarily open to 3rd parties. If we follow this definition Kakaotalk or LINE are definitely super apps, but WeChat can be considered as the second generation super app. (Third party apps in Kakaotalk or LINE are still pretty limited in this aspect to my knowledge. Kakaotalk in particular seems to have assimiliated any third-party interaction into its chatting platform.)
Is is a super app now though. I’m booking medical appointments, paying people and ordering at restaurants through LINE these days. PayPay has similar goals but doesn’t seem to be there quite yet.
Or super apps are just a second launcher on top of the iOS or Android launcher, but the app selection is controlled by the super app's maintainer, not Apple or Google.
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.
that s not what we re talking about though. There is no indication that people are not using Applepay and GooglePay because of trust concerns, it's because it is not available widely
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
...and a payment service, and a search app, and a messaging app, and a social media service, and a video calling platform, and a VOIP calling service, and a video sharing platform
WeChat is controlled by the government. They don't need an open ecosystem: if the government mandates an app then everyone will use that app. It's completely unnecessary to implement some kind of public facing API to offer the functionalities to supposed third parties. There are none.
It is an "open ecosystem" if I am understanding your meaning correctly. You can make your own ("mini") programs for WeChat. I presumed that's where the original "it is a browser" comment stemmed from.
I was trying to point out that the super-app label stems from the bevy of first-party features WeChat has built in. There aren't real analogs to that in the western world (Facebook would like to be one of them).
That the government has their hands on their scale is orthogonal to this discussion.
Google as a whole (especially in America) has a slew of services entirely comparable to WeChat. The problem is not many people use them.
They have phone and internet plans, they have mobile and desktop OSs, they have self-driving taxis, they have email, they have IM, they (had) a social network, they have a payment system, they have cloud storage and computing, they even have actual phones and computers. Sure, they miss a couple of things like a marketplace, but if US citizens somehow were forced to use all-Google devices they would definitely do everything with Google Search, Google Duo, GMail and Google Pay just like the Chinese do everything via WeChat. In that case obviously Google would integrate all their services even tighter by allowing almost everything to be done through their IM or email, but right now they are much more similar to WeChat than you might think
Except that right now simplified Chinese contents are dying on the open web due to the walled gardens these super apps built. There are also payment and some government services now must be done in these super apps in China.
It's more like saying that iOS is a browser. But that's precisely backwards. iOS is an operating system. Browsers are also basically operating systems. Superapps also behave like operating systems. This is probably where the "superapp is like a browser" sentiment comes from.
Wechat is a brower with
sdk included which website owners can easily utilize to get the user info and money. The only thing the website owner needs to do is associate the website with wechat through registertion and authetication （in the form of mini program）.
If users can put the user info and payments info into chrome or firefox brower through some kind of open protocol，and every website has the abality to issue request to utilize this information，then the browers will be the more decenterized super app.
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.