In 2021, a young Nairobi entrepreneur downloaded a super app promising food delivery, ride-hailing, payments, and shopping all in one place. 

Three months later, it was gone from his phone. The reason? Slow load times, expensive data use, and features that felt irrelevant to his daily life.

His frustration isn’t unique. In many African homes, the so-called super apps are failing to live up to their promise.

The rise of the super app dream

The super app concept is simple: bundle multiple services into a single platform so users never have to leave. In China, WeChat has over 1.3 billion users who chat, shop, book travel, order food, and pay bills without switching apps. 

In Southeast Asia, Grab and Gojek have successfully expanded from ride-hailing to payments, food delivery, logistics, and more becoming everyday essentials for millions.

The African tech scene has taken notice. Startups and investors see the potential for a similar model in one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets. 

Smartphone penetration in sub-Saharan Africa reached about 50% in 2024 (GSMA), and mobile internet use is projected to keep rising. 

Mobile money users now surpass 480 million across the continent, showing a readiness for digital financial services.

Yet, there’s a catch. Data remains expensive: in some countries, 1GB of mobile data costs more than 5% of the average monthly income (Alliance for Affordable Internet, 2023). 

Many users rely on low-end smartphones with limited storage. And infrastructure for certain services, like food delivery, is patchy outside major cities.

This mismatch between imported business models and local realities explains why super app thinking must evolve.

Why the imported model is struggling

Copy-paste doesn’t work

The WeChat or Grab model was built for markets with dense urban populations, lower relative data costs, and robust infrastructure. 

Simply replicating that in Africa ignores the continent’s unique challenges. A super app that launches with 10 features but none of them address the most pressing local needs will fail to hook users.

Feature overload

Many African consumers prefer lightweight apps that focus on one core function and do it exceptionally well. 

A bloated app that eats storage space and drains data is a hard sell, especially when people already juggle multiple low-cost, single-purpose apps that work just fine.

Infrastructure gaps

Super app services like food delivery or ride-hailing depend on logistics networks that aren’t equally developed across regions. 

Launching a delivery feature in rural Nigeria or northern Kenya may be more symbolic than practical, leading to low adoption.

What super app should actually mean in Africa

If the goal is to create an app that people use daily, super in the African context must mean relevant, affordable, and accessible, not just everything in one place.

• Local relevance: Start with services that solve urgent problems like affordable payments, bill pay, or airtime top-ups before expanding into convenience services. 

• Accessibility: Build apps that are data-light, work on low-end devices, and include offline or low-bandwidth modes. 

• Cultural fit: Offer interfaces in local languages and align with payment habits for example, integrating mobile money from day one instead of assuming credit card penetration. 

A super African app might not launch with a hundred mini-programs. Instead, it could start as a single trusted service and then grow features based on real user demand.

My opinion: Why thinking must evolve

Africa’s super app future won’t be won by those who try to own every service from the start. It will be shaped by those who build modular, flexible platforms and let communities shape the product.

Modularity is key

A lean core app that allows users to add only the features they want avoids bloat and keeps performance high. Think of it as a choose-your-own super app, where someone in Lagos might add ride-hailing and payments, while a farmer in Kisumu might add agricultural advisory and mobile money services.

Partnerships over monopolies

Instead of one company trying to build everything in-house, ecosystems of smaller, specialized service providers can plug into a single interface. This is not only cheaper for startups but also fosters innovation at the edges.

Growth with, not for, communities

Too many African tech products are designed in boardrooms with investor priorities in mind, not user realities. Super apps should evolve in collaboration with their user base using feedback loops, community testing, and even local co-creators for services.

Examples of evolving approaches

SafeBoda (Uganda)

Started as a motorcycle taxi-hailing app in Kampala. Once it had a loyal base, it added payments, food delivery, and package services but only after listening to what its customers actually wanted.

M-Pesa (Kenya)
Began as a simple mobile money transfer service. Its dominance today comes from expanding carefully into micro-loans, savings, and merchant payments. M-Pesa succeeded by focusing first on trust and reliability, then on additional services.

Ayoba (MTN Group)
An African-built messaging app with integrated games, music, and micro-apps. It keeps data use low and offers free daily data for users on MTN networks, showing how pricing incentives can drive adoption.

Challenges 

Even with an evolved mindset, there are hurdles:

• • Few developers have both deep technical skills and local domain expertise. 

• Investors often push for rapid feature expansion, even when it doesn’t match user readiness. 

• Data privacy and digital services laws vary widely, adding complexity to scaling across borders. 

• Building deep localization for one region can make it harder to replicate in another without starting from scratch. 

Finally 

Africa doesn’t need more apps that do nothing well. It needs platforms built from the ground up for African realities apps that are simple, relevant, affordable, and flexible enough to serve users from Accra to Arusha.

My advice, let’s focus on one core service, perfect it, then grow slowly with user feedback. And also create supportive data and policies so local innovators can thrive without being smothered by imported giants.