Most countries still live inside fragmented digital habits. One app for rides, another for food, another for shopping, another for bookings, another for travel, another for places, and so on. Everything exists, but everything is scattered. From the user side, it often feels less like convenience and more like organized chaos.
That’s why I keep wondering what the real barrier actually is. Is it trust? Regulation? Timing? Weak execution? Market habits? Or is it the fact that most companies still build narrow vertical products instead of real ecosystems that simplify daily life at scale?
And then there’s the funny part: you can work on something that could genuinely urbanize and simplify how people live, move, order, book, and interact with their city – and investors will still be like, “Wait, your pitch doesn’t say AI? Yeah, I’m gonna pass.” A little ironic, considering how much attention goes to trends versus products that could actually reshape everyday behavior))
So when does that shift happen? When does the world stop treating super apps like an edge case and start seeing them as the most natural ecosystem solution for modern life?
Need your opinion on this
Is the world actually ready for super apps, or not yet?
byu/CollectionMedium3712 inEntrepreneur
Posted by CollectionMedium3712
7 Comments
You’d be surprised that many countries already have them. Immigrants from those places must definitely be ready for someone to build a similar thing in NA. The barriers are regulation, scale, digitalization level, starting capital, culture (having more choice from competing companies).
The thing is each individual app does something slightly better than another app, for example uber eats might have more restaurants compared to door dash, which is why a person uses uber eats, at the same time YouTube shorts might be less distracting and more productive compared to Instagram, which is why a person uses YouTube.. My point is, people pick and choose each app to suit their preferences, and creating a super app won’t allow that, people like to use apps that they prefer and your “SuperApp” will never be able to accommodate everyone’s unique preferences, hence there are multiple apps
The problem with super apps like this isn’t about the audience as much as it is about getting all the things you’re trying to defragment to work together. If you’re looking at something that makes one app to act as the central hub for picking what to watch on TV tonight people would love that – but getting Netflix and Peacock and Amazon and Tubi and all the rest to want to be involved in that will be tricky. They want attention fixed on them – they aren’t interested in finding new ways to be positioned to compete more.
Your challenge is a supply problem more than one related to demand. I may not being put up head-to-head against my competition, but I certainly don’t want to let someone else control which criteria we’re going to be matched up on.
G.
Most Asian countries already have those.
Google and Facebook are superapps, people use them, and hate them
Your phone is already the super app
the partner channel is underrated because it’s slow. but one good integration partner brings qualified leads at zero CAC forever. have you mapped which tools your ICP uses before they need you?