Meta has been subtly improving the features of its WhatsApp messaging service without much ado, which has the potential to make it a super app.
Super applications have not taken off in the West, despite their success in Asia. Numerous services, including messaging, payments, social media, shopping, booking, food delivery, and ride-hailing, are available to users through apps like WeChat in China, Grab in Singapore, Gojek in Indonesia, and Paytm in India.
Paul Armstrong, the founder of the digital consulting firm TBD Group, wrote in the London-based business publication City A.M. on Tuesday that Meta seems to be abstracting the behaviors that are most important rather than completely replicating WeChat's model.
He added, "WeChat in China combines social media, e-commerce, messaging, payments, and even government functions into a unified ecosystem." "That level of functionality is not built into WhatsApp, and most Western regulatory frameworks would not let it."
Instead, he added, "Meta is layering in lightweight versions of those features." "Every integration is made to be low-friction, contextually relevant, and invisible when not in use."
"The outcome is a modular system with a comparable behavioral imprint, transactional, sticky, and increasingly agent-mediated," he said, rather than a Western WeChat clone.
Super App Growth Is Restricted by App Store Barriers
The notion of a super app arriving in the US has been around for a while, according to Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research, a consumer technology consultancy business in New York City.
He told Damjlaga.site, "It is been difficult, partly because, in contrast to China, where the app store environment is fragmented, here you have two main competitors, each of them has their own entry in many of these categories, making it a bit more tricky to launch such an app."
For instance, a super app might compete with Uber if it were to provide ride sharing natively. Chicago-based technology equity analyst Malik Ahmed Khan said, "That is challenging because you have to essentially pull consumers off the Uber app and into the super app."
He told Damjlaga.site that "the super app either has to have its own ride service or partner with Uber." "However, given that it can manage client accounts and retain customers on its own app, why would Uber want to give up its consumers and book through another app?"
App stores might be a hindrance to the development of a super app, according to Adam Landis, head of growth at Branch, a Mountain View, California-based provider of mobile analytics tools.
"Super applications are ingrained in everyday life in Asia," he told Damjlaga.site. Similar development has been suppressed in the U.S. by Apple's restrictive App Store standards, which prohibit payments, third-party app distribution, and ecosystem layering. However, Apple's waning influence might pave the way for the widespread use of truly amazing apps.
He went on to say, "AI is changing internet commerce." "Meta may leverage transactional intent and behavioral data to propel the next wave of AI-powered commerce by establishing a self-contained commercial environment."
He went on, "AI is the accelerant." "Platforms like OpenAI, with their multi-service interfaces and persistent context, might turn into super applications in disguise, managing transactions, decision-making, and discovery on their own."
With whom are you trusting?
Khan brought up yet another difficulty that a Meta super app faces. According to him, "there might be some resistance from a data protection viewpoint if Meta had all these different services combined into one app." "People may wonder, 'Do I want Meta to know where I am going or when I am ordering an Uber?'"
Jennifer Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland's College of Information Studies, adding, "If an app comes along that minimizes the friction to make payments, it may be attractive because consumers like things to be easy." Customers are legitimately worried about security and privacy at the same time. Do they have faith that this business will protect their financial and credit card information? Will they be billed for something they did not expect? Does fraud have a chance?
According to Golbeck, new super applications must provide something novel or more practical in order to surpass current mobile payment methods. "I may be tempted to use their payment mechanism frequently and then in other situations as well if I were connecting with individuals on X or WhatsApp frequently enough to make payments there," she told technews.
"Whether there is sufficient demand for either app is the real question," she went on. "Meta made an unsuccessful attempt to provide WhatsApp payments in India. Although they encountered significant regulatory obstacles, they were unable to overcome them and gain market dominance over more established systems such as Google Pay.
"The real question, in my opinion, is whether Meta or X can generate genuine demand for their payment system, considering the existing condition of mobile payments," she stated.
Chris Sorensen, CEO of PhoneBurner, a power dialer and CRM solutions company based in Laguna Beach, California, stated that while there may be a need for a WhatsApp super app in developing areas where bandwidth and app storage are more constrained, there is actual opposition in Western markets. He told Damjlaga.site, "People are lot more privacy sensitive and skeptical of giving one firm too much authority."
"It is also crucial to remember that super apps need extensive integrations and behavioral changes, which will not happen quickly," he stated.
Meta's WhatsApp Data Strategy
According to David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey, the consumer demand question is intriguing because it differs greatly depending on market maturity. He told Damjlaga.site, "Super applications in emerging areas solve actual infrastructural concerns – fragmented payment systems, restricted internet connectivity, different service providers."
"The value proposition is less evident in developed markets like the U.S.," he added. "Western customers already have effective specialized apps. When people are asked to combine their digital lives onto a single platform under the management of a single firm, their opposition is frequently exacerbated by worries about privacy and trust.
He went on to say, "Technically, Meta is definitely setting up WhatsApp to become a great app."
