Elon Musk’s ‘everything app’ ambitions for X faces headwinds

So-called ‘super apps’ have thrived in Asia, however the window for new entrants, such as Elon Musk’s ‘X’, has narrowed in Western markets, experts say.

The letter 'X' is part of Twitter’s rebrand, and replaced the blue bird logo last week. Picture: Getty Images

Newly rebranded Twitter faces a multitude of challenges including declining ad revenue, and now new market analysis from Forrester argues the window for so-called “super apps” — platforms downloaded as a single mobile app, that offer multiple services within their ecosystem — has closed.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, he made his ambitions for the platform clear; to turn it into an “everything app” that would include multiple services.

Existing super-apps have been successful because they were first movers, and delivered services, such as payments, messaging and e-commerce, to a trusting audience that needed them.

The 10 super apps listed in Forrester’s report were founded in 2012 or earlier.

Tencent’s WeChat, which originated in China as a messaging app in 2011, has 1.6bn monthly active users and is one of the largest and most prolific by number of services, which include medical services, banking, insurance, food delivery, ride-hailing and e-commerce. Singapore-based ride-hailing app Grab, launched in 2012, has 31 million monthly active users and has since expanded into similar services to WeChat.

However the Forrester analysis has cast doubt on whether Musk’s super app model will work.

“We don’t think super apps would succeed in Western markets,” the company’s principal analyst, Xiaofeng Wang said.

“Any existing super apps succeeded because, at the time, there was no such service available in the market. So they could generate hyper adoption in a very short period of time. And then they expanded to additional services very quickly.”

But Ms Wang said that environment did not exist in Western markets, which already had sophisticated, trusted digital services that customers used.

According to Forrester’s Media and Marketing Benchmark Recontact Survey, 58 per cent of adults online in metropolitan China said they trusted the content brands posted on social media, compared to just 20 per cent in the US.

Brand equity, which Twitter will now need to build post rebranding, plays a key role in cultivating user trust.

According to digital and marketing transformation expert at Bain & Co, Ben McInerney: “On the consumer side, the equity a brand has with its users is a really important consideration.”

“A strong user base and high levels of brand equity and trust are prerequisites to be able to ‘cross-sell’ or ‘up-sell’ any other offerings in a super app,” he said.

“Consumers are becoming more cognisant of data that social media platforms collect and how it is used. For people to get closer to a platform that started out as a messaging app, and start using it to pay bills or order groceries … requires an even higher level of trust. This is especially true when it comes to financial transactions, the most potentially lucrative underpinning of a super app.

“That’s not to say the concept of a super app should be written-off altogether in Western markets, many companies have made strides in this direction and integrated their services with varying levels of success.”

Uber, for example, has been successful in expanding from ride-hailing to food delivery.

Meta’s Threads also leveraged Instagram’s existing user base to attract more than 100 million users to the microblogging channel within its first five days.

Experts have termed Twitter’s abrupt logo change to X as a risky move for the platform and more than a decade of Twitter’s brand equity was lost almost overnight.

Since Mr Musk purchased the business, the platform has also lost nearly half its ad revenue.

Just days after swapping its logo for X, the platform also started to discount its ad prices in the US and Britain in an effort to attract brands to the channel.

Ms Wang said the rebrand had succeeded on one front.

“It has certainly generated a lot of attention. Brand awareness was built overnight,” she said.

“ That’s the one thing we see as quite positive right now.

“But awareness could be negative awareness.”