Are Super-Apps Coming to the U.S. Market?

According to an article on HBR, super-apps have been successful in Asia due to the fact that many Asian consumers' first experience with the internet was with mobile platforms that were designed as super-app ecosystems from the ground up.

This allowed early tech players to quickly grow their user bases as they incrementally added new services spanning a wide range of everyday needs.

In the U.S., many leading tech companies started out before the widespread adoption of smartphones, offering narrow, web-only services on personal computers, such as search (Google), social media (Facebook), e-commerce (Amazon), and others.

These companies later developed mobile apps, but each still offered only limited services on each app.

Super-apps have not found success in the American market due to a number of factors, including different growth paths and market positions, regulatory, technological, and cultural contexts, and organizational and financial reasons.

The tech leader is also afraid of feature bloat, which occurs when too many features are added to an app, causing it to slow down and become less engaging for users. This can also lead to some functions being seen as "second class" in consumers' minds.

A 2022 consumer survey found that 72% of U.S. respondents would be interested in using a super-app.

Recent trends suggest that US companies may be moving towards more integrated apps, with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg expressing interest in creating "everything apps."