The rise of the super-app
Elon Musk bored of the town square already? A month after completing his acquisition of Twitter, his iconoclastic gaze appears to be trained on the entire city. Mr Musk wants to build a super-app. Whether called “Twitter 2.0", “The everything app" or “X", his plans are still super-vague.
A series of slides containing hardly any information tweeted on November 26th did little to shed light on his plans. Doting references to Tencent’s WeChat provide some clues—earlier this year Mr Musk described the Chinese super-app as “Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of other things, and all rolled into one with actually a great interface". What is clear is that Mr Musk will face obstacles in his path.
A Twitter super-app would join a growing field. Launched in 2011, WeChat rode the wave of Chinese smartphone adoption. Today it boasts 1.3bn users and stunning ubiquity.
Adding payments, e-commerce and gaming capabilities on top of its messaging platform made the app wildly popular. The launch of “mini programs", the millions of third-party applications which exist within WeChat-proper, in 2017 cemented the platform as the real operating system of the Chinese internet. There is no shortage of super-app-building across other developing economies.
In South-East Asia Grab competes with GoTo, formed by a tie-up between Gojek, a ride-hailing giant, and Tokopedia, an online marketplace. Both have lost over half of their market value this year, but the concept remains a resilient one. So much so that India’s richest man, Gautam Adani, recently indicated plans to get in on the act, too.
The idea is not new. Super-app ambitions have been a staple of buzzy management presentations at American firms for years. Even Walmart touted plans to
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