How tech giants’ global battle on mobile super-apps could change our daily lives
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The tech giants’ battle for global supremacy is not only about Artificial Intelligence, but also about building platforms that encompass as many services as possible and thus attract users to a digital future increasingly left in the hands of high-profile corporations.
These apps are called Super-Apps or Everything Apps and offer a wide array of services to those who use them, from social media and messaging to e-commerce and bank transfers. Basically, the Everything App is a kind of “digital oasis” where the user can perform most of the operations they do on the Internet, which makes the time spent in the app greater. If you have everything just a few clicks away, you don’t need to visit other platforms, so you quickly become one with the ecosystem you use.
In fact, this tech business model is already widely used in Asia. In China, the WeChat app developed by tech giant Tencent has more than 1 billion users, with facilities ranging from chatting with friends to payments, reservations and more. For many WeChat users, the app is indispensable in everyday life. Using it and using the Internet are the same thing.
In fact, many of the services available in other regions of the world have local equivalents in China, explains Alexandru Voica, a marketing and technology specialist who has worked for many corporations, including Meta. This is also what Tencent was relying on when it turned WeChat into a Super-App. “Basically, Tencent developed the app and worked with all these companies […] and then all the apps are integrated and offered as a service in WeChat”, Voica says in a conversation with Panorama.
WeChat is not the only example. In South Korea, the KakaoTalk app has more than 53 million users and offers the same kind of integrated experience, and 70% of Japanese also use their own super-app called Line.
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The idea of a Super-App has also been taken up by the big American giants, who have been working for years to embed as many services as possible on their globally popular platforms and “super-engage” their users.
Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, renamed the social network to X, and in 2023, a few months after naming Linda Yaccarino as CEO, revealed that he wants the platform to “become a single all-encompassing app”, The Verge reports. In January 2025, the company announced a partnership with Visa to allow network users to make real-time financial transactions, and Yaccarino wrote on her X account that the move is “another milestone for the Everything App”.
For now, the option can only be accessed by users of X Money (X’s money transfer service) accounts in the US, and it’s unclear when or if it will be available in other countries.
Mark Zuckerberg has similar aspirations, which he wants to make a reality through WhatsApp. WhatsApp started in 2009 as a messaging app created by Jan Koum and Brian Acton, two former Yahoo employees. At the time, they wanted to launch an ad-free service that would provide a simple and secure experience for users who wanted to communicate with others. In 2014, the app with 450 million monthly users then, was bought by Facebook for $19 billion.
WhatsApp’s importance in the Meta ecosystem has steadily grown in the following years, and in 2019 Zuckerberg decided to focus on the platform’s business and growth potential as well, the New York Times notes. The decision came because expanding WhatsApp would have meant attracting new users, and therefore more revenue. In an interview cited by the US publication, Meta’s CEO even said that WhatsApp could become the cornerstone of business messaging, not just communicating with friends.
The Digital 2025 Global Overview Report data, released in February 2025, places WhatsApp as the third most downloaded mobile app and estimates that it has more than two billion users globally. The report also shows that WhatsApp is installed on nearly nine out of 10 smartphones worldwide. WhatsApp is also the fifth most visited website in the world, with about 4.5 billion monthly visitors, according to the report, which cites SimilarWeb.
out of
smartphones globally have WhatsApp installed
Source: World Population Review
Although there is no official public data on the number of WhatsApp users in Romania, a SimilarWeb ranking from February 2025 places WhatsApp on the first place of the top downloaded apps from Google Play in the country. The World Population Review website also estimates that there were 9.7 million users in Romania in 2024. According to the same website, the country in the world where WhatsApp is the most popular app is India – over 535 million users.
And yet, a Super-App is almost impossible to build. Why?
Big tech’s dreams of user monetization and global domination are fueled by the fact that people are becoming increasingly convenient online.
“The moment you have all these services in one app, you don’t have to keep making accounts and passwords and entering your card details and so on. You have one app, one user and password, you put your card in there and everything you do in the digital world or in the real world is done through the app. So you no longer have to have, from a consumer point of view, 100 apps on your phone”, Voica explains.
However, this centralization of services is neither easy to build, nor very profitable for companies. Voica says that what has helped Asian companies succeed is that each country is densely populated and there is a certain social standardization of services. When you have access to a large number of potential users, all shaped by the same cultural base and the same rules, it’s easier to build an app that meets their needs and becomes a Super-App. Comparatively, the European space is more fragmented.
That’s why, Voica says, WhatsApp or any other similar service won’t turn into a global Super-App anytime soon. The natural demographic fragmentation in Europe and the US makes the needs of users and the services they access very different, so integrating “universal services” into such a Super-App, encompassing messaging, social media, banking, ridesharing and more, is impossible.
Meta has also tried to add various complementary components to Facebook, such as dating, gaming, and marketplace services. Currently, Voica says, of all the add-on services introduced, Facebook Marketplace is the only one that is relatively successful, but it’s nowhere near enough to turn the app into a Super-App.
“The only apps that are somewhat close to WeChat have been apps for digital services, like Uber and Revolut. Revolut focuses their services on the financial side, meaning if you want to travel somewhere, they give you Internet, health insurance, many things. And Uber focuses its services on the transportation area. If you want to go somewhere or you want something to come to you, they also offer food and I don’t know what”, says Alexandru Voica. “They emerged organically, (out of the need for, ed.) utility, according to people’s personal needs, transportation and financial services. Still, I don’t think there is a clear utility for an app like social media to become a Super-App”, he continues.
Regulations are a drag on Big Tech, but they don’t effectively protect users either
In addition to demographics and fulfillment of needs issues, the regulatory side is also not conducive to a Super-App outside Asia. The American market is characterized by looser legislation, while the European market is regulated, although there are loopholes through which big companies try to escape the reach of provisions such as the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act or GDPR. Apple, Google and Meta are also under investigation by the European Commission over suspicions that they are using their power to gain advantages over competitors, and this is not the only problem the tech giants have had in recent years as a result of EU regulation.
By comparison, China has even stronger legislation than Europe and it is strictly enforced, but there is also state intervention in business and a certain degree of control.
A research from Citizen Lab shows that files and conversations made on WeChat are being closely monitored by the Chinese authorities, who are survailling political content and using it to train their censorship systems. This kind of surveillance has alerted several countries, including Canada, which has banned WeChat on government devices over cybersecurity concerns.
Bogdan Manolea, executive director of the Association for Technology and Internet, doesn’t necessarily see a global race for tech giants to build a Super-App, but rather a utopia that has always existed, but has little chance of becoming a marketable reality. No company has succeeded with such plans, and in the past even Yahoo had a failed attempt to unify services like email, messaging, and news.
“They managed to do that in China because it’s a very closed market, because they had no real competition, not even globally, with Google or Facebook. Moreover, Tencent’s relationships with the Chinese government are also extremely dubious. It is known that the Chinese government, in return for giving you this monopoly or quasi-monopoly, demands access to a lot of information. I don’t think this can be replicated in Western Europe”, Manolea says.
In the area of data protection, a super-application would also cause major problems because it centralizes a lot of sensitive information, and any security incident would be extremely dangerous, as it would open up access to personal information, banking, and many other details to attackers, by hacking into a single platform.
Until cyber attacks, however, corporations don’t act ethically either. Before GDPR was created in 2018, US companies took advantage of the fact that they could circumvent European law and collect large volumes of data. The problem is that this data collection was only ostensibly done for innocuous purposes, Manolea explains, because companies like Facebook could never transparently tell users that the data collected was being used for profiling them, so the organization could make more money. The data has been used for a variety of purposes, as targeting information for advertisements, for election purposes, or given to app makers to make their products better.
“The fact that there has been this freedom of the market has led to a massive misuse of personal data and allowed this aggregation of services”, he goes on to explain the situation in the European market. After the legislation tightened, big corporations were forced to put the brakes on these practices – an attempt a few years ago by WhatsApp to merge data from the messaging app with Facebook’s platform (as part of a plan to make WhatsApp more complex) sparked backlash from users and authorities, so Meta backed down.
What could help with the misuse of personal data is more effective law enforcement, and this should be done unified, at the macro level, not through national laws, Manolea believes.
The European market is sometimes seen as heavy on the approach on technology innovation, but Manolea believes this is actually the right approach. When the stakes are data and users’ online safety, regulations need to be rigid and complex and not allow monopolies.
On the other hand, Alexandru Voica believes that technological innovation on the European market lies in changing the way laws are made, especially since they end up negatively affecting small companies, which have to bear the costs of adapting to various regulations, not large ones, which have the resources to find the loopholes and the ways of working to manage them. In fact, Voica says GDPR was promoted as a mechanism to protect Europeans’ data from abuses by US corporations, but the effect has been that adapting to this legislation has affected European SMEs that could not bear the costs.
The digital overload
According to the Digital 2025 Global Overview Report, more than five billion people use social networks globally, and the average time spent on social media every day is 2 hours and 21 minutes, two minutes less than in the previous report. It seems like a minuscule detail, but it’s an indication of the digital fatigue we’re increasingly feeling, as algorithms heavily promote ads and content designed to generate a reaction. The threshold of our digital tolerance is also worrying companies, who are aware that every moment we spend off platforms is a wasted one for our attention, which has become our most valuable “digital currency”.
“The race for your attention and your time is what motivates companies to build these services. Your attention is more important than the money you spend, because if they get your attention, the money will come”, Alexandru Voica says.
This is causing tech companies to cram more and more services onto their platforms and suffer from technological FOMO (note: fear of missing out). The fear of falling behind the competition sometimes creates aspirations like Super-Apps or business failures.
The problem faced by companies like Meta and X not being able to find the “recipe for success” for a Super-App is also found in other markets, because even companies in China have not been able to “export” their own Super-Apps and make them global. That’s why, Voica believes, we are still far from having a platform that centralizes numerous services and is useful enough to come to dominate the planet, as the American social networking giants currently do.
So, what’s next?
Over the next few years, big tech corporations will continue to chase users’ attention, whether or not this takes the form of a Super-App.
In the new “digital economy”, attention translates into money, regardless of the type of platform used. Social networks have already created digital “echo chambers” that lock us into virtual spaces dominated by like-minded opinions and feed our cognitive biases to keep us glued to the screens of our devices for as long as possible.
In the background, algorithms push in front of our eyes content to generate as much controversy as possible and to provoke a reaction. This polarizes us, decreases our ability to accept opinions that differ from our own, and makes us feel more alone, even if we don’t realize it and no matter which side of the opinion “barricade” we are on. If big companies are chasing monetization in the coming years, users are left to chase balance in the Wild West that the digital world has become.
Articol editat de Alina Mărculescu Matiș
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