What are the Super Apps

We all know the applications of the smartphone, or of any kind of device. Maybe we even know that there are many categories of them. But do you know, instead, what are the Super Apps? It’s a new way to conceive the applications and all the web services. Let’s discover them together.

What is a Super app

Basically, a Super app is an application where we can do everything. Let’s just think to an application where we can chat, exchange money, sell and buy goods and services. Or even, an application where we can watch movies in streaming, where we can pay the bill to the restaurant and call the taxi.

The Super App is a comprehensive application. Let’s think that you won’t have to scroll between tenths of icones and open and close them all the times. With the Super Apps we will be able to freely move inside the same application and do all we need.

The first real Super App

Some sign of comprehensive application starts to be seen even here, in the West, but they aren’t really comprehensive. The chineses, instead, know very well what does it mean to have only one application, to have everything in the same place.

We are talking about We Chat, the first real Super App. We Chat, owned by the colossus Tencent, is spreaded only in China and it counts 1,2 million of users. As we can understand from the name We Chat was born as a simple app of instant messaging, but in reality it’s much more. For the chineses the application became as internet itself.

Inside it there are the chinese Glovo, Tripadvisor, ApplePay, Google Maps, Uber. With We Chat the chinese users can send money to friends, pay the restaurant, book a seat in the cinema, do online shopping, call a taxi and even send to the other users a digital business card.

Let’s try to take the smartphone of a chinese user. You will find it clear with very few applications. Otherwise on We Chat there is all he needs.

The first western attempts of comprehensive applications

In the western we arrive late about the comprehensive applications, but we can start to see the first attempt of comprehensive applications. Guess how is trying to do it? Zuckerberg, obviusly!

It’s been two years since when he announced the intention to join all the platforms until one application, a Super App, rightly.

Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger together in one big social. Sure it is an application social and messaging only. Much distance from the chinese concept of Super App, that goes from the messaging to call a taxi.

However soon arrived even Facebook Pay, instrument to do online payments, which is now available only in few countries. So, there you have the second step of Zuckerberg toward the Super App. According to some rumors, therefore, right the king of the social is studying We Chat, to “steal” its secrets. We will see the direction that will take the big family Facebook, which is moving the first steps into the world of the Super app.

The project of PayPal

Facebook isn’t the only one that wants to try to do it. Together with it there is even Paypal. The project of PayPal is really ambitious. Currently PayPal is one of the most famous platform to do online payments, but the comprehensive application imagined will allow us even to do shopping online, to manage the budget, to invest, to buy cryptocurrencies and so on.

As Schulman, the Ceo of PayPal, explains: “The purpose of a Super App is the one to take all of these applications and connect them under one ecosystem, where it will be possible to control and to optimaze all the datas and the informations inside it.

In this way, we will have a common platform and common datas that will allow the instruments of machine learning to give customized suggestes to the users”.

This post is also available in: Italiano