Only the government can come out with a super app #GoIApp

When billionaire maverick Elon Musk took over Twitter, a lot of people wondered what was going on. Out of all the other social media giants, it has been the biggest underperformer. Others find it the most toxic platform ever. What was the genius doing buying it? Was it a doomed venture? Now the fog seems to be lifting as Twitter has been renamed to X and may indeed morph into a super app. He called it the “everything app”. 

But it’s true. Once Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube all had their identities. Then they all looked like each other. You can see text, images and videos in all of them. When TikTok came, all of them tried to promote short videos. Thanks to the FinTech revolution you can convert anything into a payment app and then later get into some form of ecommerce. Potentially any app can become a super app.

Technically Meta can merge all their properties into a single app if they want to: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, WhatsApp payments etc. If the Metaverse does finally take off, then it will be another layer on top of all of this.

Super apps and Asia: Interestingly, Asia seems to be the home of super apps. One of the earliest ones was 2011’s Chinese WeChat that can be used for social media, payments, gaming, instant messaging, ecommerce video conferencing etc. It has one billion+ monthly active users. However it hit a roadblock in America when the Trump regime wanted to ban it along with TikTok. 

Another one was Alipay, which fell from grace when Jack Ma came in the cross hairs of the establishment. Then there’s Indonesia’s Gojek and Grab (Malaysia-Indonesia-Singapore). The Tatas are promoting Neu and Paytm also had a promising start. If anyone can make such a thing happen then it’s Mukesh Ambani and Jio.

Indian government gets a head start: But looking at who has made the most progress, then it’s the Government of India. In terms of registrations, every Indian citizen is on the Aadhaar bandwagon which is a dynamic system with authentication and linked to bank accounts, PAN cards etc. The DigiLocker followed, which can put all your identifications, even educational certificates, onto one screen.

One of their biggest successes during Covid was CoWIN and there are plans to expand it to the healthcare system via ABDM–Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission. This was linked with the Aarogya Setu location sharing app which would have gone further had the pandemic continued.

Then you had the BHIM App which spawned the whole UPI revolution. Today India is a world leader and at this rate, we will have (in terms of sheer number of transactions) more digital payments than the rest of the world combined.

Another innovation is DigiYatra wherein you can check in digitally, no need to carry physical tickets or identification. This is in select airports, but being expanded and add ons will be services like cabs, hotels etc. ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce) could be the ultimate ecommerce initiative in the world. 

Now just imagine if the government came out with an app called the AadhaarApp or the GoIApp which integrated all of the above services and kept adding them as and when required. This is all possible as the fountainhead is India Stack, the largest Open API entity in the world.

India is the world’s leading and largest digital democracy and the sky's the limit.