The Super App
The App Store was the finished form of renting out the place (2008). And then a second landlord appeared on top of it. On 9 January 2017 WeChat opened Mini Programs — small applications running inside the application. Five hundred and eighty thousand within a year; over four million now, touched by something like nine hundred million people a month. What matters here is less the technology than the address: a Mini Program passes through neither the App Store's review nor its thirty per cent. A landlord standing on a landlord. In Southeast Asia, Grab (Malaysia, 2012, from ride hailing) and Gojek (Indonesia, 2010, from a call centre for motorcycle taxis) bundled rides, payments, delivery and banking into one. Why did the same thing not appear in the West? The reasons usually given: the smartphone came first, with the PC generation skipped; a great many people had no bank account, so mobile payment became the substitute infrastructure; regulation was light; and — in the West, Apple and Google already held the distribution and the payment. The business of renting out the place has trouble growing a second storey where somebody already owns the ground.
The myth, corrected
PayPay and LINE are Japan's super apps
The name gets used, but the structure differs. WeChat and Grab complete payments, rides, food and finance inside a single application. Japan's version is separate applications holding hands inside a corporate group — an «economic sphere», which is a different shape from single-app completion. Calling them by the same word hides the question of why the same thing has not happened in Japan.