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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020·

Can’t think of any super apps that are doing well in India, and that’s a huge market. Our most popular messaging app is Whatsapp that only does messaging. Our most popular payments app is Google Pay that only does payments.

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WhatsApp is becoming a super app through the buildout of business messaging. You can now do your shopping in India using the JioMart store on WhatsApp.[1]

[1] https://about.fb.com/news/2022/08/shop-on-whatsapp-with-jiom...

Remains to be seen whether it sees any adoption. Cross selling has been incredibly hard in India.

Yeah nobody uses that. Payments is super easy to integrate because of UPI but otherwise no one is going to shop on WhatsApp and if WhatsApp gets significantly bloated people will simply move on to TG etc.

India likes its protectionism. You're not going to get a superapp from outside. Maybe Jio would do one?

Even JIO has several separate apps for everything. It even separates Cinema from TV for some reason

Agreed and I never understood why. Apart from the benefit of pushing updates individually to each separate apps, what is the use case of such "bifurcation"?

I suppose it would reduce download times and make the apps more responsive. But they are very bloated as is

I wouldn't be able to guess about Cinema vs TV (which would seem to have mostly the same feature set? Although maybe a TV app needs to notify about new episodes) but for other aspects, a combined app does usually mean a larger app, and unless it's a must-have app, larger apps are more likely to get uninstalled when storage is tight and users sort by size to remove. Maybe if you get people to install your TV and your Cinema app, they'll be likely to pick one to keep while cleaning?

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