We Need Super-apps Like Those in Asia

Asian super-apps like Grab offer a dizzying assortment of services, from ordering cabs and meals to paying our bills and booking vacations. However, they don't yet exist in the West. But Elon Musk is considering building one dubbed X. Nonetheless, they have become an essential part of daily life in many regions of Asia during the past few years. Furthermore, people typically use Grab to order takeout or to get a ride home after a night out. However, a lot of people in Singapore also use it to ship packages and documents or to shop online. In addition, other extensions let you reserve hotel rooms, bus and boat tickets, and even have a professional Covid swab test performed at your house. Moreover, you can pay for these services through the finance system of the super-apps. For that, you can set up installment plans, use an e-wallet connected to your bank account or credit card, or pay with points you accrue from using the app. You can also use the system to make cashless purchases. For instance, you pay for items at a shop by scanning a QR code with the app, or you can get a physical card linked to your account. Grab is not the only super-app in town, though.

Other Asian super-apps

There are several super-apps available, from GoJek in Indonesia to Paytm in India, that allow you to do even more, like order gasoline for your motorcycle, pay a traffic ticket, and buy gold. Furthermore, these super-apps are popular in the area of digital natives, with 88% of internet users in South East Asia alone owning a smartphone.

The first super-app in Asia

China's WeChat is the original Asian super-app that was allegedly the source of inspiration for Mr. Musk's X. WeChat is a messaging and social networking platform that has grown to become one of the major apps in the area in terms of the number of users and the services it offers. According to the most recent estimate, China alone has 1.29 billion users. In addition, consumers use WeChat as one of China's largest payment networks to buy goods and services and send money to one another. According to some studies, a Chinese user spends up to a third of waking hours on WeChat. There has been much written about how WeChat has evolved into a tool of censorship and monitoring due to its pervasiveness in Chinese daily life and functioning in a highly regulated society. Moreover, there are worries about how it might contribute to the various controversial "social credit" schemes in China, where citizens' lives may be restricted based on their bank credit scores or social behavior. Messages, posts, and even accounts are routinely blocked for content deemed politically sensitive. Additionally, WeChat developed its own scoring system in 2020, granting users who maintain strong in-app credit records more privileges.

Drawbacks of using super-apps

WeChat serves as an excellent example of the core issue with super-apps - because people are doing virtually everything on a small number of platforms, these apps end up gathering a lot of information on their users and may even have some control over how they live their lives. Therefore, countries that highly value privacy, how the apps treat such data, and to what extent governments should have access to it will be part of the debate. So, if Mr. Musk's X super-app materializes, some people would view it as a double-edged Swiss Army knife. However, for other people, the ease and convenience of managing everything through a single app is an easy trade-off to make. Besides, for individuals who have serious privacy concerns, there is always the option of reducing the use of the super-apps. Moreover, specialty apps will also continue to compete for users' attention in open markets, decreasing the likelihood that the majority of data will end up in the hands of just one or two companies. For example, WeChat's dominance in China is a result of the fact that the government blocked some apps, like Twitter and WhatsApp.