China backed the concept of tools users perceive as an extension of the OS, not just an app
Catch a ride, pay your utility bills, order your dinner, top up your insurance, chat with friends – how many apps did you need to get that lot done? In much of the world North America and Europe your answer could involve a fistful of apps, but in Asia you could do it all in one, thanks to rise of the « superapp ». Superapps are, for now, largely an Asian phenomenon, although the concept is more than a decade old. Blackberry founder Mike Lazaridis coined the term in 2010 to mean « a closed ecosystem of many apps that people would use every day because they offer such a seamless, integrated, contextualized and efficient experience ». Academic and researcher of digital business models and ecosystems at Singapore’s ESSEC Business School Dr Jan Ondrus thinks a better definition for a superapp is essentially « an operating system ». In conversation with definition to The Register, he likened superapps on mobile devices to using Windows on a desktop. « With a superapp, » said Ondrus, « you don’t need to use multiple apps, you can use just one app and tap into a lot of other services – you can live pretty much inside the superapp. » That convenience matters, because the crowded real estate of a smartphone home screen only has so many slots. App publishers have come to realise that offering more functions in one app is their ticket to prominence and ongoing user engagement. To truly understand superapps, consider the most popular of them all – and probably the original superapp – WeChat. WeChat began as a messaging platform for Chinese tech giant Tencent in 2011. It is now a gateway to more than one million services – including ride hailing, booking flights and hotels, making medical appointments, accessing social media, making payments, and even arranging a date. Plenty of those services are offered by third parties through « mini-programs » – tools that allows businesses to create their own digital products and offer them to WeChat’s users. WeChat takes a fee on transactions. While users can choose to use only Tencent’s messaging services, there’s no reason to leave for almost any other service.
