By UM’s Sharon Soh
One of the biggest platform phenomena to emerge from APAC in recent years has to be the super app. What is a super app? It is many apps within an umbrella app, or perhaps it is actually not really an app as much as an operating system for smartphones.
Now, mention the word ‘super app’ and WeChat immediately comes to mind. While some might argue that the super app concept already existed before WeChat did, there is no denying that this super app reigns as king, particularly in China.
WeChat now counts over a billion users with more than two-thirds of the Chinese population using it for an average of several hours a day, and more than a hundred million Chinese citizens using the app outside of the country’s borders.
Its usage ranges from media sharing to social media posting, movie bookings, taxi-hailing, payments, video calls, commerce and more. And when WeChat launched its mini program a few years ago, it further stretched the functions of the platform since the last big addition of WeChat Pay in 2013, which sparked China’s cashless revolution then.
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