IN THE EARLY YEARS of this century, when malls were getting popular in India, there was palpable excitement in the way clothes, gaming parlours, groceries and restaurants came to be housed under one roof. Today, a similar disruption is in the making in the digital arena. This disruption that we are talking about is the emergence of the super app, a single mobile app that offers basic services like chat and payments, but also has a host of other thirdparty ‘mini-apps’ for e-commerce, food delivery, healthcare, etc. Not dissimilar to a physical mall that houses a variety of brands.
In many ways, the super app has become the Holy Grail that every company—from conglomerates like Tata and Reliance to fintech players like Paytm to even Big Tech firms such as Facebook and Amazon—is in the fray to own.
In India, super apps are still in a nascent stage, but across Asia, they’re a rage. China’s WeChat, for example, started out as a messaging app, but today it can be used for anything from finding a date to getting a loan and more. It offers more than a million different services through a network of mini apps developed by businesses within WeChat. Singapore’s Grab, Indonesia’s GoTo, Vietnam’s Zalo and South Korea’s Kakao also work on the same principle.
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