Is anyone aware of recent arguments and discussions on the topic of superapps in western markets? I was curious about this after reading the above article, but a quick google only surfaced articles with not-too-compelling arguments[1].
FB trying to merge many messaging apps seems similar, but for only one service (messaging), and Uber has a credit card, Eats, and transport but they are more of an app constellation than a super app (perhaps a super app from the driver side, but am curious about consumer case in western markets).
One has to understand what the drivers for super apps are first.
The reason they do well in China is that:
1. Most users use android and there is no reliable & trustworthy single popular App Store.
2. So people at scale rely on the apps that came preinstalled. WeChat famously is!
3. Since it’s hard to get people to install new apps, devs through all products into their one app that has distribution
In the west the preconditions are very different, hence there is no force driving this behavior.
I think it's differrent internet culture and demographics, what is a computer or smartphone? To average people it could just be that app, QQ or Wechat, using a smartphone is using Wechat. Computers appear in China relatively late, for young people, they'd rather have a smartohone than a computer.
And lastly, user experience, apps in the west need to mind the laws and media, but in China tech companies basically can do whatever they want, so it's always the race to the bottom coz that's where the winner will be. So you have Wechat filled to brim with hawkers/salesmen/marketers with unfettered false ads, its "self-media" platform feeding people the most eye-catching junk articles. User experience doesn't mean much when the popualation is so big they can just lock as many people on their apps as quick as possible, then the picky ones are forced to deal with it as it's a "superapp" - everybody is using it and they are not going to change.
So there you have it, the superapp experience: your boss and coworkers messaging you at night and weekends; the local police where you rent your room asking you to register ID and verify face on their Wechat applet; your acquaintances and parents sharing the latest self-media top story about stoping drinking coffee immediately coz Americans found it's carcinogenic.
Most of the author's arguments are compelling, but I am very skeptical if any app in the west will ever reach super app status.
Regulators are already considering actions against FANG, although, if compared to Tencent, neither Google's or Facebook's positions in the market seem that threatening at all ...
Building a "real" super app might actually be dangerous for any company int the west.
It's strange how prevalent these things are in Asia and yet non-existent in the West. Whatsapp is only just now jumping on the payments bandwagon. Were it not for how crappy Chinese banking is and the difficulty onboarding they easily could have been outmanoeuvred here. I guess the popularity of QR payments in the East also helps too.
Wechat pay is quite popular even outside of China, seen some tiny mom and pop stores in rural Thailand/Malaysia accepting it. I've spoken to Chinese tourists who say they barely bother carrying cash to most cities in SEA.
> Wechat pay is quite popular even outside of China
You have to be a Chinese tourist to use it. It isn't used by locals or tourists from other countries.
Other countries solved the cashless problem long ago with credit cards, which just never caught on (mainly because of horrible banks, ICBC AmEx places the burden of proof on card holders for fraud).
I've only been to an ATM twice since leaving China in late 2016. As a foreigner, WeChat never worked very well for me (they want a copy of my Chinese ID card????), so I had to carry lots of cash. Heck, before around 2012, I was even paying the rent with cash (pay once every 3 months, need 20k+ RMB...ATM has withdraw limit of 3K RMB per transaction...ugh).
Yep, them too. They could have dominated the region were it opened to international payments, but seems like typical stubborn government getting in the way, doubt tencent or alibaba are holding it back. Even for foreigners with work permits in China it's apparently incredibly hard to link foreign accounts with these payments systems.
Works great for the Chinese, not so much anyone else. They really dropped the ball on that. I see local alternatives springing up all around the place. Grab probably will win out in South East Asia.
I'm quite used to contactless payments in Australia but work over there a lot and going back to card + pin is painful. I'd happily use the QR code payments given the chance but legacy banking is struggling to adapt.
QR is a poor substitute for contactless. America has screwed up their chips, however, making even contactless pay too slow, I can't imagine QR codes would improve anything unless the money was onloaded somehow (like how it works at Starbucks).
American EMV has some dumb decisions baked in, but as far as speed goes it's not the chips, it's the existing in-store backend processors. A lot of them are over slow and unreliable connections (GPRS is super-common, as are phone lines shared by many points of sale). As processors are forced to upgrade, Americans are seeing faster chip transactions.
Companies that prioritize this--Walgreens comes to mind as an obvious example--have chip auth under ten seconds. It isn't optimal, but it's improving.
Even stores with faster connections like grocery stores in bigger cities it is "wait a few seconds" (less than ten, they have it down to 3-5 seconds at this point) and then collect the receipt after it slowly prints out.
Whereas in Australia, it is just "tap and go." Starbucks works similarly with their QR code buying (but the money is onloaded to a digital gift card; but then I never use it anymore since mobile ordering is so damned convenient).
Could Snapchat be something close? I don't know all the features, but it had games, a social geo map, commercial published content, and personal social content. Although the only third party integration is for filter and ad creatives, it "feels" like it might go there someday.
FB trying to merge many messaging apps seems similar, but for only one service (messaging), and Uber has a credit card, Eats, and transport but they are more of an app constellation than a super app (perhaps a super app from the driver side, but am curious about consumer case in western markets).
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/michelleev...