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This article is part of our Opinions section, where we invite industry professionals to share their views on the most pressing technology questions of our time.
Brace yourself: you’re going to be hearing a lot more about the “everything app”. What that looks like exactly is something a few high-profile companies are, no doubt, very keen to figure out right now. Klarna’s CEO wants to turn the platform into a “super app” with the help of AI; Airbnb’s CEO has stated his ambition to turn its platform into the everything app.
We’ve seen that kind of rhetoric before. Elon Musk has been vocal about wanting to make X into the everything app. Even when a platform hasn’t outright promised to do “everything”, the underlying theme is clear: companies increasingly want their platform to offer more than they already are. Meta added dating to Facebook, Spotify added video, Uber added trains and flights, and Rocket Companies bought real estate listing site Redfin so it can become ‘a housing super app’.
What that speaks to is a common frustration that many end users feel today: there are too many apps, and the apps are far too fragmented. If you’re counting, there are roughly 9 million of them – all competing for slivers of dwindling attention spans. Maybe CNBC tech reporter Arjun Kharpal said it best at the start of 2025: “We’re all sick of dozens of apps on our phones.”
Super apps, however, are an opportunity for many tech companies and service providers to reinvent their business model in a way that not only makes financial sense but also benefits consumers. Why provide only travel when you can also be the one-stop shop for dining at home, watching films, and shopping your groceries?
For a company to actually make the super app dream work, they’d have to overcome a big obstacle: the user experience. What would it even look like?
There’s already a reference point: the APAC region. WeChat, Gojek, Paytm, and Alipay are just a few examples of the all-in-one experience in action. But there are some big cultural differences that explain how and why countries like China made the super app dream a reality and the West didn’t.
Unlike the West, China basically skipped over the desktop computer phase, largely due to the high cost and unreliability of its broadband infrastructure. It effectively spurred it onto a mobile-first ecosystem far sooner than the West.
What that means in practice is that, many years later, Chinese end users aren’t particularly loyal to any single brand in the way that many Westerners are. So, if you’re asking people to abandon their loyalty to Spotify or Netflix for their music or TV streaming endeavours, in favour of an everything app, that’s not something you change overnight. You’d need a killer user experience for that.
As for what the killer experience looks like, the answer lies in personalisation. Unlike the 2000s or 2010s, the 2020s have introduced a new element that might finally make the concept of super apps in the West mainstream: AI agents.
Crucially, what AI agents do is far more than just aggregate services on a page. They learn from you, including all the restaurants you frequent, the Thai chain you love, your penchant for ordering Pad See Ew after late-night concerts, and your preference for battery efficiency in laptops.
It’s easy to imagine a future that’s sooner than you think, in which we’re surrounded by an army of AI agents that all integrate with one another across a vast network or even exist inside the same interfaces customers are already used to – whether you prefer Apple Music or Spotify.
There’s also a genuine opportunity for AI agents to democratise app development. Rather than build an app from scratch, the next big ride-sharing company of tomorrow could use an API to hook up its ordering system to an AI agent. This agent could then generate code that works for every relevant platform or operating system that users might be on.
This wouldn’t make developers irrelevant, mind you. I’m a firm believer that you’ll always need engineers to build platforms that creators can use to make interfaces. It’s just that the emphasis of “engineering” will shift from things like coding to ideation.
Ultimately, the UI of any super app will determine whether or not it succeeds as a trend. We’re already starting to see more and more suggestions around the web that voice-assisted agents will replace the traditional user interface as we know it. I have my doubts.
In my experience across technology in a variety of sectors, from automotive to consumer electronics, the one constant is this: people like physical touch. They like to feel tactile feedback and see information displayed visually accordingly. They want to swipe through menus, pinch-zoom maps, and see ETAs on their food delivery. If there’s a future where that’s no longer the case, we’re a long way away from it.
When apps are so fragmented, it’s a good time to start thinking about super apps again, but not for the sake of yet another tech trend. Like any technology, AI agents and super apps should make people’s lives easier. The true value in the agent-super app combo is empowering the digital day-to-day journey for both consumers and creators. It’s high time we unshackle ourselves from closed ecosystems and look to something more interconnected.
