Super App
Mobile apps have become a critical part of day-to-day life in Latin America, Africa, China, and elsewhere.
In the United States, there’s an app for everything, but in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, people are increasingly turning to everything apps.
These “super apps” offer a digital ecosystem to manage much of modern life. Depending on the app, users can chat online, get a ride, have food delivered, shop for clothes and other gear, buy an airline or concert ticket, purchase insurance, make a medical appointment, or connect with telemedicine.
Super apps have driven massive growth in the digital economy in regions where a lack of physical infrastructure had hindered economic development. Now, mobile and satellite technologies enable tens of millions of people in remote areas to participate in the digital economy.
In Latin America, Colombia-based Rappi began in 2015 as an app to connect small businesses with nearby customers; today, it offers food delivery, shopping, digital payments, insurance, and travel in nine countries in Central and South America. The Argentina-based Mercado Libre e-commerce app and its credit unit Mercado Pago offer shopping and selling, payments, transfers, savings, and insurance in countries including Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.
Africa has been a rich ground for super apps such as trailblazer M-Pesa, which began in Kenya as a microfinance tool and grew exponentially. Today it links people in countries from Egypt to Tanzania and Mozambique to financial services such as lending, savings accounts, microinsurance, and investing and offers a wide variety of other mini-apps for daily needs. Gozem in francophone Africa started as a ride-hailing service and now offers grocery and food delivery, e-commerce, financing, and digital banking.
The most super of super apps is China’s WeChat with about 1.4 billion active users. WeChat started as a messaging service but now offers social media, voice and video calling, mobile payments, digital wallets, e-commerce, and travel. Other Asian super apps include Singapore’s Grab, which began with ride hailing but has added delivery, insurance, payments, and other financial services, and Indonesia’s Gojek, which followed a similar path.
