Speaker 1: Think about the apps you use on your phone every day. Studies have shown Americans use an average of 46 mobile apps each month to complete a variety of everyday tasks. Now imagine if you could combine all of those programs into a single standalone app. A one-stop shop to socialize with friends, order food, pay rent, or even consult with a doctor. A super app of

Speaker 2: sorts. A super app is a software program meant to be used on a mobile device that has multiple diversified services and a common payment platform and is widely

Speaker 3: adopted. The best and most popular example is Tencent's WeChat. Now it began in 2011 as a simple messaging and photo sharing app. From there it moved into payments, games, shopping, even a place to book your doctor's appointments. While

Speaker 1: super apps have flourished in Asia, their adoption in Western markets, including the US, has been slower due to a variety of factors. But that could be changing as more and more tech companies set their sights on bringing the super app model

Speaker 4: to the US. Elon Musk rebranding Twitter to X this morning. It's all part of his larger ambitions to create an everything app that combines messaging, social

Speaker 5: networks, and payments. We're watching shares of Expedia and Uber this morning. A Financial Times report said that Uber has explored a possible bid for the

Speaker 3: travel booking website. It fits into an ambition that CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has held for years and that is to build a super app similar to a WeChat in China that combines multiple products and services on one platform. So what's

Speaker 1: behind the appeal of super apps in Asia? Why is the United States been slow to adopt the everything app model? And can we expect a super app in the US anytime soon?

Speaker 6: Super apps are basically an app where you can do multiple things within the app

Speaker 2: itself. They can include anything from social media and messaging, to ride hailing, to online marketplace, to dating, to booking a doctor's appointment, and

Speaker 6: the list goes on. Most of the well-known examples of super apps today are probably in Asia and namely in China. Tencent and WeChat really was the original super app. You've also got Alipay which is run by Alibaba affiliate and financial also is a massive one as well. They collectively have about more

Speaker 2: than two billion users. The most famous is China's WeChat. It started around 2011. It has messaging platform, social media platform, but then over time, they sort of bolted on all these additional services. Ultimately, it notched 1.3

Speaker 3: billion monthly users who had very little reason to ever leave this app. It

Speaker 2: became an ecosystem in and of itself. So by some estimates, the WeChat app has a million or more mini programs that are contained within this single what we

Speaker 3: call a walled garden. Elsewhere in Asia, super apps have taken off as well. You've got South Korea's Kakao is used by more than 90% of all smartphone users in the country. There's Line in Japan, Grab in Southeast Asia, Paytm in

Speaker 6: India. We're all sick of the dozens of apps on our phones. And the appeal of the super app is that all of those functions of those apps are in one place in the super app itself. It's convenient. It's frictionless because you have so

Speaker 2: many diversified services contained within a single app. This just makes it sort of a one stop shop for consumers to have access to the variety of services that they would need for the majority of their daily life needs. Professor

Speaker 1: Dan Prudhome, who wrote about the likelihood of super app adoption in the U.S. for the Harvard Business Review, says frequent app engagement also allows companies to collect data on individual users.

Speaker 2: So it can help triangulate the product and service offerings that it gives to you. And it can also be useful for targeting advertisements. So it's really beneficial for consumers. It's beneficial for the service provider side. And it's also beneficial for advertisers.

Speaker 1: Similarly, a greater willingness by Asian consumers to adopt the so-called everything app model, as well as a greater willingness by Asian companies to innovate, have both allowed super apps to gain widespread popularity in

Speaker 6: the region. Super apps work in China and the broader Asian market because it's a very Internet savvy population. One that has leapfrogged desktop, gone straight to mobile.

Speaker 2: Asian consumers in many markets were less locked into desktop based applications. And so when an attractive mobile device based app came along, they really adopted it widely. In many places in Asia, there's sort of less of an aversion to being reliant on a single company or few companies to sort of offer you products or services to cover the majority of your everyday needs.

Speaker 1: Another critical element to super app adoption in Asia is the introduction of digital wallets.

Speaker 3: One of the most important aspects of this is payments and banking. That is how those Asian super apps grew.

Speaker 2: In the U.S., for example, the consumers and the merchants were very reliant on credit card infrastructures to transact. That is not the case in many places in Asia, China and elsewhere. By introducing these digital wallets, which are essentially just kind of like a private bank that's not reliant on credit card infrastructure to function, you offered sort of a cheaper and easier way to transact amongst consumers and merchants. And that certainly encouraged the adoption of the super apps in many places in Asia.

Speaker 1: Many in Silicon Valley have long considered WeChat as the gold standard for mobile apps, and tech companies have set their ambitions on creating the next super app for the U.S.

Speaker 2: market. We already are, to some extent, seeing super apps in the United States. They're just not as super, if you will, as as WeChat.

Speaker 6: Elon Musk, for example, for years has spoken about X, the company he now owns, as turning into a super app. And you're seeing him talk about things like payments, for example, and other integrations into X. You think about WhatsApp, it's trialing out payments in India. Facebook Messenger has integrated Meta's AI assistant. So you're seeing all of those apps slowly bring on more and more features

Speaker 2: as well. You look at Amazon, right? Of course, you have Marketplace, but you have video streaming and you have music streaming and you have a pharmacy option and a place to book doctor's appointments. You look at Facebook, you've got social media. You've got messaging, but you've also got a marketplace. You've got a gaming function. And Uber, of course, has ride hailing, but it also has Uber Eats and grocery delivery and parcel delivery and so on.

Speaker 1: Uber, for its part, recently discussed a potential acquisition of the travel booking company Expedia, a move analysts say would further cement its status as a travel super app.

Speaker 7: This is one step toward a super app and no different than what we see in Asia. The super app concept is where Uber is going. This is really Uber trying more and more to be a one stop shop when it comes to travel.

Speaker 2: So I think there are clear examples of super-ish kind of apps already being widely adopted in the U.S. and to some extent, I think there's room for other super-ish kind of apps to take off in the U.S.

Speaker 1: There are several reasons why tech companies have been unable to bring the super app model to the U.S. One of the main challenges, regulatory and antitrust concerns.

Speaker 2: The regulatory environments in the U.S. today is certainly not as conducive to allowing a super app to develop. There's very strong protections on things like peer to peer lending, data privacy, antitrust and so on that don't allow the apps in the U.S. to quite thrive in the same way that WeChat could.

Speaker 6: If an app does everything, questions will be asked. Is it monopolistic? How is revenue being shared with the services that are on board the super app? Is it hurting competition? These are some of the other questions I think competition regulators will

Speaker 1: look at. Another major challenge facing U.S. companies contending with existing competition in the marketplace today.

Speaker 6: The U.S. market is way more fragmented and there are so many more players and competitors. You think about China. WeChat is the dominant messaging app. It's so ingrained in a Chinese society and used by Chinese people every single day. But in the U.S., it's different. There's WhatsApp, there's Apple iMessage, there's Signal, there's Telegrams, there's multiple different messaging apps. And in a particular category, you think food delivery, you think taxis. There's multiple different competitors who are often rivaling each other. And actually, they don't want to share data or share customers.

Speaker 2: And also in China, there was, of course, some protectionism which allowed namely WeChat as an infant company being shielded from, say, competition by Facebook or Twitter or Google, YouTube and so on.

Speaker 1: Then there's the third obstacle for companies, user behavior.

Speaker 6: People have different relationships with brands, with the apps they use. If I'm going to book a holiday or a flight, I might use a specific provider. Or if I like my food delivery from a certain place, I go there or my shopping from another place. I'll go there. You have to have the users on board. Will they be willing to say, use all these services via an app that's owned by Meta or by Uber or by Apple or whatever company is? I think you can expect to see a super app in the U.S., but nothing like how it is in Asia or be perhaps a super app like, shall we call it. You'll see green shoots of that appear. Companies will begin to start adding features and integrating other services into the app.

Speaker 2: I don't think we're going to see a super app in the sense of WeChat. Right. If WeChat, if we use that as the gold standard of what a super app is, it's kind of a global anomaly. It has a million or more mini programs embedded in it. We're not going to see something like that in the U.S., I don't think,

Speaker 6: anytime soon. Some of the challenges around the fragmented marketplace user behavior regulation will really, I think, stop a U.S. company from building anything akin to the likes of WeChat in China, for

Speaker 2: example. However, we already are seeing super apps of sorts, what we could call super-ish apps being widely adopted in the U.S. So we have Amazon and Facebook and Uber. And together, they have a lot of different services that really cover the majority, I think, of people's everyday needs.

Speaker 1: Uber, for its part, has said it would continue building on its super app

Speaker 8: ambitions. We are slowly but surely building that super app that can be your operating system in your local town. Anything and everything that you want, anywhere you want to go, we as Uber want to be there for you. There's no other company that's trying to do this and there's no other company that's executing that local super app vision as we are.

Speaker 6: The super app definitely began life as a Chinese phenomenon spread out to the rest of Asia. But there's no reason why some aspects of that can't be replicated around other parts of the world. I think it's just a longer journey. It's more of a journey that requires changes in user behavior.

Speaker 2: It's very apparent now that U.S. consumers are willing to adopt a super-ish kind of app. They like the convenience of the apps. They don't want to have app overload where they're downloading all different types of apps. And so I think there's a real, you know, value proposition there for super apps.