I Doubt There Will Be a Us Super App
My Googly wife is the lone Android holdout in the family. Most recently my daughter moved over to the Apple-verse, when she got an iPhone 13.
I have been loving Apple Music, TV+ (Hello Ted Lasso) and Fitness+ during the pandamic years. For a mere $5 per month extra, most of us are now fully Applified with Apple One: Music, News+, TV+, iCloud+, Arcade, and Fitness+.
And yet, I observe that the youngsters could care less. They live in the Snapchat-Instagram-TikTok-Spotify-verse. Their friends live the SITS-verse. SITS+Venmo is our WeChat, our super-combo. Yet, a super-combo is not a super-app.
Tech pundits have been talking about the race for a US-based super-app. I am not convinced there will ever be one.
Apple has a full house: Apple Pay, AppStore, Music, iMessage, and TV+. Yet, their poker table is restricted to those with Apple devices, and limited to the affluent adults. With the billions in an Irish bank, Apple would be smart to acquire Spotify or Snapchat to keep a connection with the youngsters.
Facebook/Meta is sputtering to build one. Yet, with Instagram and WhatsApp, they hold important aces. If Facebook’s reputation wasn’t in tatters, they had a great opportunity to buy and assemble a super app. Yet, their brand is tainted. Few companies will want to hitch their wagon onto the meta-train. Also consumers will be very wary to give Zuckerberg more than we already provided him. Payment information? No thank you!
Google isn’t that hot among the kids. They all use Google applications for school or university. Yet, in the app space, I don’t hear them talk about Google Photos. Yes, YouTube remains hot.
Snapchat, Twitter, Square, and Spotify are all superb on their own. They are all puzzle pieces, yet, none of them match a WeChat.
Perhaps a Square-Twitter-Spotify combo has potential in the near term. With Twitter stock trading this low, it is ripe to be acquired.
Yet, I don’t see a US-version of WeChat easily being assembled, at least not one that will be popular among the youngsters. We’ll keep using a number of individual applications.
Given the concerns around Facebook or the size of Apple and Amazon, the focus should therefore shift towards interoperability and portability.
Congress could mandate a level of interoperability or portability between applications: allow different messaging applications to communicate, allow different music stores to exchange playlists, etc.
In a world of many-great-apps, at least we can move more easily between different apps. This will create more competition among applications, away from having to buy into a platform or super app.