In China, WeChat has become the indispensable app for everyday life. It is more than just a social media chat app. It has become a super-app that runs other micro-apps and services inside it. You can do everything with it, from buying train & movie tickets, investing, ordering food, dating, shopping, to cashless payment, etc.
It seems that Elon Musk wants to bring X towards this direction. But will it work?
My take is, it will not work. The crux of the problem is this:
The Chinese market is one of hyper-early adopters. This article from The Australian explained it clearly. Chinese society has experienced dizzying amount of change over the past decades. They are used to change. Along with it, they’re willing to try out new things constantly and quickly discarding the ones that don’t work. For example, even beggars in China have to change and adapt by displaying a QR codes to accept WeChat/AliPay payments.
How does this relate to super-apps?
Super-apps are COMPLICATED. Here, in the Western market, we are moving towards minimalism and simplicity. A super-app is diametrically opposite to this. It is complicated, noisy and messy, with millions of knobs, dials and buttons. Only hyper-adopters can stand the disorder. Chinese society is conditioned to experience continuous and rapid change. And with it, brings complexity, mess, disorder and noise, which is something Western societies are trying to get away from.
Apple has tried to move us towards the concept of micro-apps with App Clips. But how many of us have heard of it, let alone use it? I have yet to have the chance to use App Clips on my iPhone, despite it being available since iOS/iPadOS 14.
So, my prediction is that the super-app concept will fail in our part of the world. We have a completely different market. We don’t have a critical mass of hyper-early adopters to make this concept work.