Erik on product management and such
Why do China’s internet users prefer super apps that bundle numerous unrelated services into one app, over specialized single-use apps? That’s a trick question; they don’t. The emergence of super apps in China is entirely driven by commercial forces and to understand it, we need to trace back to the early 2010s when the smartphone became the everyman internet device and the immense competition that brought to the internet sector. We should also look at the rationale of services launched by, for example, Alibaba since its founding, and note a significant increase in consumer-facing offerings launched post-2010.
Dawn of a new ecosystem
In most Western countries, internet adoption began with desktop computers in the 1990s. China’s mainstream internet users mostly skipped that stage. For many Chinese users, the smartphone was their first and only personal computing device. As of 2010, internet penetration in China remained under 35%, and mobile networks were only just becoming widespread. In Western Europe and the US, internet penetration reached 50% in around 2001. China would not hit 50% until 2015, which is when we can say that the internet really went mainstream.This meant that, when mobile apps arrived, there was little entrenched behavior around web browsers, email, or desktop-first search. If you’ve worked in China or in a Chinese company, you will know that people in China rarely check their email. The information that you would send in an email is instead handled by mobile-first channels like WeChat and SMS.
Living in Beijing at the time, I bought my first smartphone in the Summer of 2011 almost solely to be able to use Pleco, a specialized Mandarin dictionary app, to study vocabulary before and after my university lectures so that I would ube able to understand what was going on. WeChat was launched in January 2011 but it wasn’t an instant hit. We kept using SMS to communicate even until late 2011; it was only when viral features like “drift bottle” and “shake” that let you connect with strangers nearby that my friend group started using it. Over the next few months our messaging slowly migrated from SMS to WeChat. Friend groups were set up and small businesses and event organizers created groups with a max capacity of 500 users to promote their activities.
To improve on the way businesses were using user groups, Official Accounts (OAs) were launched in the Summer of 2012. These OAs were used similarly to Facebook Pages; brands, stores, bands, bars and clubs would announce their latest news on their OA, and when you discovered a new cool store, the first thing you would do was to open WeChat to follow them their, as a way of bookmarking them and to be reminded of them in the future. Very few of these small businesses would have websites and they probably didn’t show up on Baidu.
WeChat Mini Programs were launched in stages from 2016 to 2017 as a natural extension of Official Accounts. Brands naturally wanted to be able to not just push their messaging but also, for example, let users buy tickets to events directly in WeChat. These mini-apps were built in Tencent’s WeiXin Markup Language (WXML), a variant of HTML. This cemented WeChat’s role as a portal to the internet, or perhaps as a browser. The first thing you would do to learn more about something was often to open WeChat and see if you could find a related OA or Mini Program, and businesses would ask you to scan their QR code to follow their OA.
Baidu, once China’s dominant search engine, failed to transition effectively to mobile. CEO Robin Li initially viewed the mobile internet merely as an extension of the PC era, famously stating in 2012 that the mobile internet lacked a "proven business model" and that Baidu was merely "laying out, observing, waiting, and preparing”. When information was published inside the WeChat ecosystem and specialized apps for reviews and local search like Meituan’s Dianping, that broke Baidu’s model of crawling the open internet. It lost its role as a portal to the internet, mainly to WeChat. China’s behavior for “browsing the internet” was now established as, instead of opening a browser and accessing a web search engine, opening WeChat and tapping the search bar.
By the end of the 2010s, WeChat had become much more than a messaging app. It was a payment tool, a social network, a ride-hailing service, and a way to order lunch, all within one interface. But it should be noted that WeChat and Tencent provided none of these services themselves, as you would expect of a true “super app”. They simply mediated access to web apps, just like Google’s Chrome does. That’s why I think a mental model of WeChat as a browser provides far more value than as a “super app”, which preserves an aura of mystique around the Chinese internet rather than making it legible.
The agony and ecstacy of a blank slate
Now that we understand WeChat not as a Super App but as a browser-equivalent, we can examine how and why other internet giants expanded horizontally and packed multiple services into the same native app.At the start of the 2010s, much of China’s digital economy was still undeveloped. Most industries had not yet built online infrastructure. Banks didn’t offer consumer-friendly online payment systems. Retail was still dominated by cash. E-commerce was new and not yet trusted.
This opened a wide opportunity for ambitious internet companies. Alibaba, for example, launched Alipay to solve a simple but critical problem: Chinese banks were unwilling to hold money in escrow for small online purchases on Taobao, its e-commerce platform. Without a trusted payment layer, online marketplaces would struggle. So Alibaba built one.
Swift and reliable delivery was another pain point that needed to be solved if e-commerce was to grow and go mainstream. So Alibaba built Cainiao with the goal of being able to guarantee delivery within 48 hours, and JD launched their own logistics business.
Across the board, the logic was simple: if an adjacent service didn’t exist or wasn’t reliable, tech platforms would have to build it themselves. The upside was that they would own it and could grow it by linking it directly from their main app. It was the fastest, most efficient way to ensure the success of newly launched services because it reduced the friction of downloading yet another app and create a new account, which the majority of users would avoid doing.
Let’s look closer at Alibaba and the services they have launched since 1999 until 2025. From 1999-2009, they launched 11 services. From 2010-2025, they launched 41 services (I’m certain there are actually additional services I missed in my research; still the inflection point in 2010 remains clear). This is a result of the increase in internet penetration in the Chinese population as a result of accessibly priced smartphones, and the blue ocean that the mainstream consumer internet was at the start of the 2010s. There was no clear leader in most verticals if they even existed; with their established user bases, giants like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent saw almost unlimited opportunities to use their existing user bases to bootstrap new services.
Alibaba’s increase in active services is a result both the pressure from new venture-backed startups, and the immense opportunity that 700 million new internet users offered:
In an environment with few incumbents and minimal regulation, companies had freedom to grow horizontally, and did. With so much opportunity, you can imagine why a 996 work schedule was pushed. The idea was that you had to be first or you would have already lost.
Walled gardens
The expansion of super apps was also shaped by a more defensive tactic: limiting competition. For years, China’s internet giants Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and later ByteDance, blocked each other’s links, services and payments inside their platforms.If a user on WeChat tried to open a shopping link from Taobao, it simply wouldn’t load. If you wanted to pay for an item on Alibaba’s platforms, WeChat Pay wasn’t an option. In effect, these companies created walled gardens, each trying to keep users inside their own ecosystems.
This encouraged platforms to bundle as many services as possible into one app. All giants aspired to evolving their flagship apps into a digital mall offering food delivery, ticket bookings, social media, and payments in-house.
Here’s a selection of services launched by Alibaba and the rationale for each launch. As you’ll see, the focus was not on providing a better user experience through a Super App, but to expand the digital conglomerate wider and faster than the competitors could.
Low spending power, high stakes
Perhaps the most underappreciated reason for China’s super app boom is economic. In the early days of mobile internet, Chinese consumers spent less online than their Western counterparts. Their lifetime value to a single-purpose app was low.
The response from platform companies was to offer more services per user—to raise revenue without needing more users. Once a customer joined an app, companies did everything they could to keep them there: integrating games, banking, travel, and shopping.
It was also expensive to attract users in the first place. To win market share, companies gave out coupons, subsidies and even cash, as with Tencent’s now-famous red envelope campaigns to promote WeChat Pay during CNY. Once they had a user’s attention, the smartest move was to monetize them across as many touchpoints as possible, without ever sending them to a competing app. Bundling services into one interface reduced churn and acquisition costs at the same time.
There is no user preference for Super Apps
Most writing I see on the internet explain the emergence of Super Apps in backwards way, and state that because they exist it must be because users prefer them; that the reason they exist in Asia and not in the West is because of some mysterious “cultural preference”, as in this example:‘In the West it is all about the “user”, the singular person. While app developers want as many people as possible to use their app, it’s still a singular approach. App developers in Eastern cultures consider the user as well, but within a more social, communal, context. These are two very different mindsets.
The very nature of super apps in Asian cultures is built around communal activities. Societal acceptance is an important aspect of Asian cultures and there are a number of customs and norms that reflect that. The practice of using little red envelopes with small amounts of money in them is an important social custom in China and Japan, for example. This can be done digitally as well through a super app.
[...] Asian cultures aren’t into minimalism. Apps and websites are crowded and complex. That’s a cultural preference.’
This is pure conjecture. As I’ve explained above, Super Apps exist because of market conditions and business incentives. Additionally, I have suggested a mental model of WeChat as a browser rather than a Super App; an equivalent to Google Chrome. Seen through this lens, Super Apps already exist in the West but they’re called browsers. Browsers let you access all the same varied type of services that WeChat does.
There is no evidence for a cultural preference for Super Apps in Asia, but lets continue to examine this further. First, there are in fact many examples of apps in China (Xiaohongshu), South Korea (Naver) and Japan (Mercari) trending towards a simpler, more measured and modern interface, aligning with global design principles.
The vast majority of apps launched in China are single-use apps, in fact outside of the apps built by the few tech giants, all of them are single-use. Not only that, but increasingly we are seeing that these apps are on a trajectory towards established global design principles of simplicity and focused functionality.
As an example, below is the WeChat Mini-Program from a new coffee chain in Shanghai. Clean, lots of white space and restrained use of color:
The takeaway
Super apps didn’t emerge in China because users demanded them. They emerged because a set of unique market conditions—mobile-first adoption, greenfield industries, competitive blocking, and low spending power—made them a smart strategy.However, it needs to be said clearly and strongly that the concept of Super Apps itself is flawed. WeChat in fact does not let you do all 10,000 things you could possible want to do on your phone. Yes, you can open links to Dianping to view restaurants, or order taxis through mini-programs, but once you want to go further, for example to set up an account and view history or save to favorites, you will be led to download the app. The WeChat ecosystem of mini-programs is the mobile version of the open web, where we search websites, try out the service, and may then go and get the mobile app.
For product leaders in other markets, the lesson isn’t necessarily to replicate the super app model, but to recognize how platform scope, regulatory context, and infrastructure gaps shape product decisions. In some cases, bundling may be the right move. In others, building best-in-class focused apps might win. What matters is understanding what’s driving growth: user demand, or business necessity.