Elon's failed attempt to build a "Super App"

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The key thing Elon is missing here is that for a super app to work you need trust. And judging by the mass-layoffs and childish behaviour, people have lost a lot of it in regards to twitter

A super-app sounds like a massive privacy nightmare. We already have plenty of those, thanks.

It's already lost. The first thing a payments app needs is to be trusted, and his bad calls have destroyed all the trust people had on Twitter. It won't get anywhere.

One of the main issues here is that the userbase of Twitter is just abysmal compared to those super apps. Wechat already was running on literally everybody's phone when they added these features, while Twitter barely has active users, it's just a 'shouty app' for a marginally small amount of people worldwide. The value here was that there were verified users (famous people, organisations, even govt offices) who could post updates in real time and publicly. Now this is basically collapsing with the new and broken blue system, so all that is left is a shouty app for a few angry users, and i for one definitely would not want to do any financial stuff on such a platform.

You can have a super app work nicely in a single very large country, but a super app in the west would have to take into account the different services, providers etc in each country. This would make it very complex and probably unusable in many countries. Nobody would bother.

Isn't relying on one service to do EVERYTHING kinda scary? Now one company holds ALL the data. Who in their right mind would use such a service?

In order to make a super app feasable, you not only need to develop it first, but you also need to get over the legal challenges too. Something that in the western world just won't fly by.

I think Elon accidentally put himself into a position where he needed to purchase Twitter (entering an agreement as a joke) and now he's just trying to do what he wants using Twitter's base instead of building a whole company from scratch (which he could have done at any time) because he needed to do something with the company he reluctantly bought.

In Brazil, the Central Bank created a payment protocol named PIX to handle digital transactions between person-to-person or person-to-business. The transactions generally take seconds to complete and it's widely adopted by banks and business here. Any digital payments that are not credit card based and don't use PIX are destined to fail here. WhatsApp, for instance, is insanely popular in Brazil, but no one uses it to transfer money because they don't use the PIX protocol (since they're not a bank with local representation). I imagine that a lot of other countries have some distinct local financial behavior, and I think Twitter/X will not be able to localize their solutions.

I kind of think the reason modern apps are so successful is because they do one thing. The early internet in the West has websites that tried to do everything at the time but didn’t do tasks well.

Really fascinating how these super apps have their own mini-apps which are basically web apps. As well as the fact that these mini-app stores serve as people's main source of apps in China as they don't have access to the Google play store and (I assume?) the Apple app store. It reminds me how Steve Jobs originally wanted apps on the iPhone to only be web apps. Of course, that never happened, so it's kind of interesting to see a real life version of that "what if" scenario actually play out.

The US already effectively has has 2 super-apps. iOS and Android OS. They provide access to tons of downloadable “mini-programs” and serve as a central hub from which the everything else you do with the phone is accessed. Making another super app would effectively just be adding another unnecessary step to the process of doing what you want to do.

At least in the Netherlands, you don't really need an extra app for payments because there are interoperable standards that all banks use. It's also why things like Paypal and even the concept of credit cards aren't that big here; you just hardly ever need it. And nobody outside of China needs an app that pretends to be an OS because we already have those. I also think that people in more established markets tend to be a bit more wary of the concept, regardless of who runs it.

Twitter barely functions as Twitter as-is, if he really expects it to become as big and as comprehensive as WeChat he’s living in a fantasy, but that was hardly hard to believe.

If elon wanted to succeed, he should've just kept it as twitter and downplayed his involvement while introducing new features until you can do pretty much anything on it

Personally, I'd rather have a handful of apps that each specialize in a certain task/function rather than a "SUPER" app that tries to do everything at once.

I wanna have an app within my app where I can open a super app to run a mini app with a script on the website that will run a java game launcher within an emulator to run my banking app

I don't think it will, Twitter had a tiny user base, low trust, and a terrible ux. Not much has changed yet, so it would require some insane transformations for it to even stand a chance to survive as a social media platform.

I will never understand why some people think this is a good idea.... It's like saying "I want to live under a monopoly that has complete control over what I see and do".