A super app is one app that offers many everyday services, such as rides, food delivery, parcel delivery and payments, with one login and one wallet. The best-known super apps are in South-East Asia and China. Two large South-East Asian super apps build part of their software in Bengaluru.
The idea is that each service brings users to the others. Someone who downloads the app for a ride later orders food in it. Someone who orders food later pays an electricity bill from the wallet in the same app. Each new service costs less to market, because its users are already in the app. When each new user and each new service makes an app more useful to everyone else, this is called a network effect.
Consider an office worker in Jakarta, Indonesia. In the morning, she books a motorbike taxi to work for Rp 18,000. Rp stands for the Indonesian rupiah, the local currency, whose prices run into thousands. At lunch, she orders noodles from a restaurant through the same app. In the afternoon, she sends a parcel to her mother across the city. She pays for all three from the app's digital wallet, which she tops up from her bank account. She never logs in again, and never types her card details.
Inside, a super app is several separate products that share a few common systems. The ride service is a ride-hailing app, with its own system for assigning drivers. The food service is a food delivery app, with its own restaurant partners. The parcel service often delivers for other businesses as well, as delivery as a service. What the services share is one user account, one wallet, one pool of drivers and riders, and one record of what each user does. The app uses that record to decide which service to show each user next.
The hard engineering problem is the size of one app. Dozens of teams add features to the same app, and each team wants space on the home screen. Yet the app must still open quickly on a cheap phone with a slow connection. So the teams split the app into smaller parts, called mini-apps, which load only when the user opens them.
India has no super app on the same scale. Some Indian UPI payment apps have added shopping, travel bookings and bill payments. But most Indians still use separate apps for rides, food and payments.