Super Apps are redefining the future by offering unparalleled convenience and hyper-personalization. These apps seamlessly merge our digital and physical lives, anticipate and predict our every desire and need, and let us access a universe of services, from augmented reality shopping to virtual healthcare and everything in between. Their superpower? They make everything available with a single tap. As boundaries blur between industries, super apps are forging new ecosystems, creating a gateway to a world of limitless possibility.
So, what is a Super App? One way to think of them is as a collection of related services and functionalities on a smartphone targeted at specific interest groups, where everything is a single click away. Given their rising success with consumers, businesses will soon want Super Apps to improve workplace communication, collaboration, efficiencies, engagement, and loyalty. Super Apps have the potential to transform the mobile landscape and offer exciting opportunities for businesses and users (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
Businesses that have invested in digital transformation are developing internal applications with roles-based access for sales, marketing, operations, finance, and facilities. However, the application environment soon becomes crowded, unwieldy, and difficult to manage. This is illogical, several workflows—such as login or chat—are common to every application, and even a tiny change in the process means the enterprise must make the change separately across several such applications. A single app reduces the effort to the barest minimum.
Building a Super App requires significant time, resources, and expertise in user experience design, software development, and infrastructure management. To succeed, Super Apps must offer a seamless and intuitive user experience while providing a wide range of functionalities and services (see Figure 2).
Figure 2
However, the potential benefits of a Super App make it a worthwhile endeavor for businesses looking to provide a one-stop-shop solution for their customers. A single Super App minimizes the overhead of onboarding and change management. It delivers richer user behavior data to help developers customize, rationalize (the features), and improve the Super App.
For enterprises that are amid their digital transformation journeys, an organization-wide Super App has become a necessity, especially because employees want frictionless interaction with colleagues and easy access to organizational processes, some of which are listed here:
- Important organization-wide broadcasts
- Project and product announcements and reporting
- HR Playbooks, checklists, guides, and support
- New employee onboarding
- Training and Development programs
- Procurement processes
- Approved vendors
- Access to the service delivery platforms
- Polls, surveys, and internal competitions
- Events
- Customer details/ Customer visits
- Community activities
- Social messaging and chat
- Video conferencing
- Helpdesk access
- Service anniversaries
- Job postings/ Referrals
- Podcasts, blogs
- ESG targets and commitments
- Rewards and Recognition
- Travel requests
- Expense claims
- Timesheets
- Attendance management
- Salary disbursement
- Leave management
- User profile
- Password reset
Super Apps are a revolution in the making—and China’s WeChat, with a staggering 1.67 billion monthly active users worldwide, is showing us the way. And across the world, from Grab and Gojeck in Southeast Asia, Paytm and Tata Neu in India, Rappi and Careem in other parts of the world, everyone is following.
A 2022 study called The Super App Shift: How Consumers Want To Save, Shop And Spend In The Connected Economy showed that 7 in 10 respondents were interested in a Super App, 90 percent of whom were motivated by the convenience of an integrated app. Gartner estimates that over 50 percent of the global population will become daily active users of multiple Super Apps by 2027.
One of the leading reasons for the growth of Super Apps is app fatigue. App downloads have plateaued (255 billion downloads in 2022 and 257 billion downloads in 2023), and studies forecast they will keep falling. Users will migrate to Super Apps–where all the action is brewing.
Author:
Dileep Kumar,
Practice Head – Mobility
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