A super app is one which kinda does “everything.” More accurately an app that provides several services (functions) which are mostly unrelated services each of which could be modeled into a single stand alone app. Think of an app that allows you interact socially like Facebook, chat like on WhatsApp book a cap like on Uber make payments like with Paypal and goes on to offer you a significant number of services in just one app.

As of now the term super app is not yet common (not a Wikipedia article at least) so largely that’s my way of defining it. After reading several articles, listening to trend experts and observing for myself I think it’s fair for us to see supper apps in that way.

Do we have supper apps already?

A super app is one which kinda does “everything.” More accurately an app that provides several services (functions) which are mostly unrelated services each of which could be modeled into a single stand alone app. Think of an app that allows you interact socially like Facebook, chat like on WhatsApp book a cap like on Uber make payments like with Paypal and goes on to offer you a significant number of services in just one app.

As of now the term super app is not yet common (not a Wikipedia article at least) so largely that’s my way of defining it. After reading several articles, listening to trend experts and observing for myself I think it’s fair for us to see supper apps in that way.

Do we need supper apps?

The ease with which apps can be created today has made the app market so crowded even non developers can create apps! This means there are millions of apps that do one thing or the other, the thousands that do exactly the same thing and another set of thousands that actually do nothing but just spam the app stores. Ever tried so many apps out before finally finding one? I know how annoying it is to download an app and find all it has it ads or spam! The difficulty in finding new apps (in the pool of apps having same and deceitful names like other competing apps). This worrying trend could mean people would encourage a “group” of verified or well known apps that solve their problems. A very high quality and strict store like Apple app store suffers less from this.

By the way do you really want to have an app for everything on your device? Like a Calculator, Reminder, Memo, Chatting app(many of them), Facebook, Twitter, Intsagram, Snapchat, shopping … Too much already!! That too can be a leading cause for the slow but progressive nature of the trend. You answer the question do you need a supper app?

Bad news or good news?

This can be bad news and good news at the same time but for different parties as it would generally ease the lifes of users. But won’t be exciting for app developers and startups as the large companies will just swallow new ideas into theirs, that can be difficult but it works though we all have seen how Facebook introduced snap-like statuses into WhatsApp after a failed attempt to acquire Snapchat an integrate it into their already giant platform. The debate continues.