LONDON - Super-apps are associated with China’s internet giants and hot emerging market upstarts. As rivals like Facebook’s WhatsApp and old-world businesses like India’s Tata seek to burnish their all-in-one mobile application credentials, Breakingviews explains how some might find room to prosper.
That can be appealing. It declutters a smartphone’s home screen, a valuable piece of digital real estate. And one app consumes less memory and battery than several different ones. That’s useful for people coming online for the first time through cheaper and less powerful handsets. In mobile-first emerging markets such as China and Indonesia, super-apps have taken off.WeChat is the best example, though it hardly brandishes the term itself. Compatriot Alipay is another.
The newest member of the rapidly expanding club might be Russia’s internet group, Yandex, which just acquired an online bank. Non-technology outfits are also muscling in on the trend.There is no set business model. Tencent doesn’t break out WeChat’s earnings, but pushing mobile games to the app’s vast user base has benefitted the company’s main cash-cow gaming business. Tencent also generates income through advertising, while leaving it to third parties to provide most of the other services.
By contrast, privately-owned Grab and Gojek remain unprofitable. The latter started out building most of the services offered, but that has been costly, especially on top of the cash-burning subsidies used to compete for users and merchants. Gojek is now starting to use more outside partners.Yes, in theory, provided the app is popular enough. Facebook-owned WhatsApp is experimenting with new services in different markets.
seems like all the good articles always come in the early morning when people in the US are sleeping
the picture shows a spying app