Thread by @lillianmli

I come not to praise the super app. But to bury it.

The first gen Chinese tech companies went with being user centric route since they had such greenfields in front of them.

Everything was offline and vaguely dated. There was the real opportunity to leapfrog. 🧵

2) It was easier and cheaper to sell additional services to an existing user.

So food delivery apps went into hotel and flight booking. Podcasting apps went into e-commerce. Every app started having mini-games to keep the user’s attention.

3) Though the fact that every consumer app thought this way meant that every consumer app was a super app.

Pretty soon, consumers were being sold financial products from their podcast platforms, bike rentals and food delivery apps.

This got tiring v quickly.

4) The current generation of consumer apps are coming into a very saturated market.

The key trends have been to focus on simplicity, AI curation, interactivity enabled social and younger users

5) TikTok and Xiaoyuzhou are good examples of this.

Both relies not on extensive features to keep the user, but high personalisation through AI curation and interactivity enabled social - where discussion and community happens around their content

6) the super app has achieved market saturation. Long live the super app.

I give more visual examples in this week’s edition

lillianli.substack.com/p/readers-ques…