Super apps deserve a second chance
Maybe it’s time to give super apps another go. They never really took off in the West, but with AI agents now in the mix, there’s an argument that conditions may be ripe for the super app dream to finally be viable.
From WeChat to Gojek, Paytm, and Alipay, the APAC region is pretty familiar with super apps – i.e one app to rule them all. It’s the dream of all your favorite applications for payments, fitness tracking, doctor appointments, social media, paying bills, taxi ordering, food delivery, and more in a streamlined one-stop shop and user interface.
To varying degrees, the West has tried to replicate this concept over the last decade, and not without reason. CNBC tech reporter Arjun Kharpal perhaps said it best recently: “we’re all sick of dozens of apps on our phones.” But maybe that’s an understatement, because as of 2025, there are roughly 9 million mobile apps in the world.
Typically, most apps in the West have been purpose-built for a particular function. With so many apps competing for consumers’ attention, however, that model won’t be sustainable for long at the rate that apps are multiplying.
So, what would bring super apps into the mainstream? The answer may be AI super agents.
Director of Technology Strategy at Qt Group.
Why super apps misfired in the West
There’s a good reason super apps have struggled in the West. Consumer behaviors in the APAC region evolved along a path that was very different from North America or Europe. China’s desktop internet phase never became that mainstream, thanks to high cost and reliability challenges related to its broadband infrastructure. Instead, China prioritized a mobile-first ecosystem, courtesy of some lightning-fast infrastructure buildout. This placed virtually every data-related activity inside people’s smartphones. It only made sense to centralize all that data activity somewhere.
The West, meanwhile, developed a much more fractured app landscape across hybridized desktop and mobile device usage. How often did people complain about that in the 2000s, or the 2010s? Well, for the most part, Westerners accepted that reality – enough so that people are exceedingly loyal to brands. You can’t flip the status quo overnight.
Some companies have certainly tried to beef up apps by consolidating features. A recent example includes Rocket Companies’ desire to become ‘a housing super app’ following its deal to buy the real estate listing site, Redfin. But there have been other cases like Meta adding dating to Facebook, Paypal experimenting with combining social media and finance, or Spotify adding video features. Even Uber’s CEO has talked before about wanting to build “the operating system for your everyday life.”
Personalization will be AI super agents’ superpower
For a super app to truly work, the tech industry would need to go much farther than it has to unite customers’ favorite features and apps into a single, user-friendly interface. This won’t be easy, but AI agents significantly mitigate that difficulty in one crucial way: personalization. Today’s services have to be tailored to customers’ preferences.
The great thing about AI agents is they wouldn’t just aggregate services or spit out the latest prices for smartphones when asked. They can adapt to user behavior and preferences. You could even get an agent to compare prices across the platforms you regularly visit or book a trip to Bali for the best price-quality ratio. It’s not too hard to imagine a vast network of specialized AI agents running in integration with each other. In theory, those specialized agents could operate inside the same familiar interfaces customers have already been using. There’s genuine potential for an app ecosystem so interconnected that the very concept of individual apps could fade away with time.
This would even have significant implications for how developers build apps. They wouldn’t have to build apps from scratch. If the Uber of tomorrow could just hook up an AI agent with its ordering systems through APIs, you could conceivably get that agent to generate compatible code for every relevant platform or OS. That would mean the complete democratization of app development. Developers would, of course, still need to facilitate things like the interfaces that creators use to build apps. But learning to code would take a backseat to developing great ideas with the human languages we already speak – the ultimate programming language.
Super apps and super agents needs to feel super to use
Whether super apps ever reach mainstream popularity in the West will hinge on the user experience. If the selling point of super apps is convenience, then the Alexa model of voice interaction alone won’t cut it. Integrating agents into super apps would have to be done with the understanding that humans like to actually feel tactile feedback and see information displayed visually.
The benefits of a good UI/UX would extend far beyond the usability of super apps. A good UI/UX could in theory lessen challenges around making AI agents compliant with strict data and privacy regulations that discourage developers from feeding large aggregates of information through an AI (which hurts the personalization benefit). Imagine if a user was given a privacy control panel that looked like a graphic equalizer – accessible, while still offering users universal control over data.
Sooner or later, super apps will probably become more of a necessity than a dream. Oversaturation of apps will be a problem for businesses and consumers alike, and whatever solution the tech industry presents should add convenience to counteract inconvenience. Like any technology, AI agents and super apps should be a means to an end, solving genuine problems. We should not be holding any end users or developers captive to any application or system.
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Maybe it’s time to give super apps another go. They never really took off in the West, but with AI agents now in the mix, there’s an argument that conditions may be ripe for the super app dream to finally be viable. From WeChat to Gojek, Paytm, and Alipay, the…
