6 Best Practices to Design a SuperApp for your Enterprise

Yandex Go started as Yandex, a taxi app, and now delivers more in its new avatar, like packages, documents, groceries, and food from restaurants and cafes. This is just one example of how a specialist app has expanded its service offerings to provide customers with convenience and ease in performing multiple actions on one platform. Rappi is another example of a very popular app in Latin America. It offers a range of services, from booking an e-scooter, to making payments, P2P transfers, buying tickets to movies and concerts, listening to songs, picking up packages, and even walking your dog!

Such apps that offer multiple mini services under one platform are called SuperApps. Gartner equates SuperApps to a Swiss army knife, the demand for which is being driven by youth who require powerful and easy-to-use mobile-first experiences. It also expects 50% of the global population to opt for SuperApps by 2027. Quick to tap into this trend are ‘forward-thinking organizations’ that create composable application and architecture strategies to capitalize on new business opportunities in relevant and related markets.

Key features of the SuperApp are:

• They offer core features and enhance personalization by delivering a variety of mini apps such as messaging and payments.
• They consolidate services, features, and functions from a variety of mobile apps into a single app to enable customers to use it for multiple operations.
• They improve customer experience and ease of use with features like single sign-on (SSO), data sharing, app usage tracking, and preference-based push notifications.
• They are poised to support other services like Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, chatbots, and metaverse for an immersive experience.
• They help in achieving economies of scale, improving user experience, leveraging a large user base, and engaging different mini app teams effectively.

Super App Development – Best Practices

While consolidating multiple apps on a single app platform provides several benefits to the users, the development of such an app brings with it, its own challenges. Therefore, the right strategy, resources, and implementation become key.

The 5 Best Practices for the development of super apps include

Best Practice #1 Focus on Core Offering

Yandex started as a taxi app and then expanded. Identify the core service offering, ensure the supply side economy to build customer loyalty and trust, and constantly improve customer experience with that service through feedback and enhanced customer service. Create a list of key features and prioritize them based on customer requirements. Identify features that can differentiate your app from the rest in this space. In addition to the features relevant to the core features, include some must-haves like integration with Google and social, payment systems, and multi-language support, especially if the user base will go beyond boundaries.

Best Practice #2 Expand and Simplify

Once you have a substantial user base, expand your service offerings. Your users should be able to perform activities easily and have a seamless experience between the different features available. For instance, users should be able to leverage promotions, make payments, or cancel without exiting the app.

Best Practice #3 Collaborate to Grow

A single company cannot build for providing comprehensive services around the core offering. Therefore, forge partnerships with other suppliers to provide a unified experience and add value. Ensure the apps are credible and robust so that there is no compromise in user experience.

Best Practice #4 Select the Right Platform

The choice of platform will depend on the target audience. If the product is a niche, to be used by an identifiable, limited set of people, a single platform may be effective. But where the reach is wider with a variety of apps, you could choose between a single platform, multiple platforms, or a mobile-optimized website. Factors such as the availability of resources and budget will influence these decisions.

Best Practice #5 Elucidate Your Digital Business Model

How you plan to monetize your SuperApp is important to make the app sustainable and profitable. Since there are many mini apps, some from other vendors, having a clear strategy becomes critical. The app could provide some services free of charge to win customer trust and monetize the core functions. Another option could be to provide limited features for free and added functionalities for those who pay. The subscription model is the third option, and advertising revenues is the fourth option.

Best Practice #6 Build a Top-Notch Tech Stack

Robust tech stack along with a skilled development team is essential for building a feature-rich app and integrating multiple mini apps for a seamless performance. This spans the entire spectrum from the right cloud service such as Google Cloud, Azure, or AWS; technology suites such as HTML5 and CSS; programming and testing languages such as Python, Java, C#, Python; developer tools such as Redux, ReactJs, Ruby on Rails; testing frameworks such as Selenium; to other tools for marketing, management, analytics, and payment gateways. Security is another key aspect as data and finance are involved and any compromise can lead to erosion of customer trust, noncompliance, and loss of reputation.

Partner with Indium for Building a Killer SuperApp

Managing the development, testing, security, and integration aspects of SuperApps requires multiple skills. Building the tech stack and designing the architecture for scalability, flexibility, and robustness are critical.

Indium Software is a technology solution provider with cross-domain expertise and vast experience in developing cutting-edge solutions using best-of-breed technologies. We work closely with our customers to understand their core focus and design, develop, test, and deploy solutions that empower users to be more effective in meeting their goals.

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