WeChat in China has grown into the world's best example of a "super app," which collects a wide array of services and capabilities like banking, messaging, social media and shopping under one icon and login.

WeChat launched in 2011 and today has 1.3 billion users, mostly in China. Its success has big Internet companies around the world eyeing super app opportunities in their own markets.

"You basically live on WeChat in China. If we can recreate that with Twitter, we'll be a great success," Elon Musk told Twitter's employees last month, according to The Verge. That was when he still wanted to buy the company.

Musk isn't the only tech CEO talking up super apps.

[W]hen you've diversified engagement across a wide variety of products in the same application, that can really strengthen your business," argued Snap CEO Evan Spiegel last month.

According to The Wall Street Journal, other US tech companies looking to create super apps include Facebook owner Meta, Uber, Spotify and PayPal. Each hopes to plug more features and functions into existing offerings to keep users more engaged. Meta, for example, is working on adding shopping functions to its Instagram app.

Figure 1: (Source: Tim Bennett on Unsplash)

So, should telecom operators consider a similar play?

Some already are. Indian conglomerate Tata Group, which operates a substantial fiber network in the country, has rolled out its own super app called Tata Neu. As noted by TechCrunch, the app offers services from nearly a dozen properties that are financially related to Tata, including an online grocery, a pharmacy and a payments service that offers loans and insurance.

In Africa, MTN's Ayoba, which launched in 2019, is considered the continent's first super app, according to a Pymnts article. It offers payment services, dozens of content channels and several other micro apps.

Safaricom's M-Pesa and Vodacom's VodaPay could also be put into the super app category. For instance, VodaPay offers some banking services but also the ability to shop at various retailers, order food and store funds in a digital wallet.

Telcos are getting into the digital ecosystem game to avoid becoming "a dumb pipe," wrote Jay Johhar, a partner at Lloyds Ventures, in a post on LinkedIn. They want to "leverage the access to customers they have, trusted billing relationships, managed security, and other aspects. For telcos it might become a great play to go beyond connectivity since they weren't successful in the Internet boom."

So far, none of the big US or European network operators has publicly committed to developing a super app, but there are hints that US operators are eyeing the potential.

For example, T-Mobile has experimented with selling everything from banking services to streaming video options to fiber Internet connections to travel services. Most of those offerings remain disparate, but they could theoretically be combined into a cohesive app.

Similarly, Verizon recently introduced its "+play" app that allows users to manage a variety of content subscriptions, while Dish Network recently launched the BoostOne app for the Boost Mobile brand.

Marketing evolution

One important driver of the interest in super apps involves marketing and advertising.

On desktop computers, there's an industry-wide shift away from browser tracking cookies. On smartphones, Apple recently implemented technology on its iOS platform to prevent marketers from tracking users across multiple apps. That move alone is expected to cost Meta $10 billion in 2022. Alphabet has also promised to prohibit tracking on its Android platform starting in 2024.

At the same time, legislators in the US and elsewhere have begun moving to protect Internet users' privacy, in part by preventing marketers and advertisers from tracking users' movements across the web.

Thus, companies like Alphabet and Meta – which make the bulk of their revenues from selling their users' data to advertisers – have a clear incentive to build super apps that can keep users engaged and advertisers informed.

Historical perspective

Ultimately, though, there's little reason to believe that telecom operators will be successful in pursuing a super app strategy when their history of developing digital ecosystems is mixed at best.

For example, Verizon, Sprint and others operated digital music storefronts in the days of the iPod but have since ceded the space to streaming providers like Spotify. Similarly, most of the big US wireless network operators teamed up on a mobile payments effort in 2013 called Isis, which was rebranded into Softcard before Google acquired the business in 2015.

More recently, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile all pursued some type of streaming video business only to quickly withdraw from the space in the face of heated competition.

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— Mike Dano, Editorial Director, 5G & Mobile Strategies, Light Reading | @mikeddano