The End of ‘Apps,’ Brought to You by AI?

By Miao Luo, Director of Technology Strategy, Qt Group.

The super app dream isn’t dead in the West. It just never had the right mechanism to propel the concept into mainstream appeal.

For years, the tech industry hyped up the super app model, which originated in China with WeChat and Alipay. Many in the West wanted to copycat the concept—one app to rule them all. It would offer everything from pizza delivery, to payments, fitness tracking, social media, cab delivery, and electricity bills inside one seamless user interface.

But what if that mechanism does exist now? Enter AI super agents, the very thing that might finally break the West’s resistance to super apps.

Why Didn’t Super Apps Take Off in the West?

Context is first needed about why super apps have a larger presence in APAC compared to the U.S. or Europe. In countries like China, the consumer behavior journey evolved along a much different path, skipping the desktop internet phase. When Chinese citizens went ‘online,’ they were already in a mobile-first ecosystem (so-called Mobile Internet), and consumers have relied on their phones ever since for virtually all data activities. The logical conclusion was to centralize and integrate those activities in one place to attain convenience.

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The West’s hybridized desktop and mobile device usage, meanwhile, developed a fractured app landscape. Westerners are comfortable with this setup—even loyal to brands—so for a super app to garner traction, it would have to unite the best features of customers’ favorite apps into a singular and extremely user-friendly interface. That is no easy feat.

This hasn’t stopped tech companies from inching towards more bundling of features, such as Elon Musk’s attempts to turn X (formerly Twitter) into ‘the Everything App.’ Whether you believe in that aspiration, Elon isn’t the only person in the West with sights trained on the super app dream. Uber has arguably come closer than most, adding services like flight booking, for example. Its CEO has expressed desires to compete with Amazon and make Uber “the operating system for your everyday life.” PayPal flirted with buying Pinterest to combine social media with finance. Spotify is combining audio and video features.

Personalization Is the Ace up the Sleeve for AI Super Agents

There’s a good case for integrating and centralizing our favorite apps. Apps have historically been purpose-built for narrow and often singular uses. With apps extending into the millions, this model probably won’t be sustainable forever, especially considering the many apps competing for consumers’ attention.

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Achieving the dream of a unified customer experience is possible, not by building a bigger app but by AI super agents. Much of the groundwork has already been done: AI language models like Claude and GPT-4 are already designed to support many use cases, and Agentic AI takes that concept further. OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Meta are all making general-purpose agents that can be used by anyone for any purpose. In theory, we might eventually see a vast network of specialized AI agents running in integration with each other. These could even serve customers’ needs within the familiar interfaces they already use.  

Crucially, personalization is the big selling point. It’s the reason AI super agents may succeed where super apps failed in the West. A super agent wouldn’t just aggregate services or fetch a gadget’s price when prompted. It would compare prices across frequented platforms, apply discounts, or suggest competing gadgets based on reviews you’ve left for previous models. It could even book you a family trip next week to Hawaii for the best price-quality ratio. It’s a paradigm shift towards a far more interconnected app ecosystem. But eventually, even the apps themselves might disappear.

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Imagine if the Uber of tomorrow didn’t have to write code for the next big ride-sharing app or make it work on every platform and operating system. Instead, they could just hook up the API integration from their ordering system to the AI system, allowing the agent to communicate with users. Now imagine the AI assistant sits at the OS level, on a future device containing an immensely powerful GPU/NPU, supported by blazing-fast connectivity.

This new ‘super agents’ reality would yield significant benefits for developers, too, possibly even redefining what it means to be a developer. While lots of startups invent good ideas daily, the reality of the software business is that you’re always limited by the number of developers available. A super agent future could reduce that challenge by unlocking a new population of users who aren’t necessarily trained as developers. It’s the democratization of app development. Developers will always be needed to facilitate things like the interfaces creators use to build apps. But for many creators, learning to code will be secondary to developing good ideas with the human languages we already speak – the ultimate programming language.

Super Agents Will Need a Super UX

Of course, the deciding factor for super agents will be the user interface—not just the one that consumers use but the one that developers use to build applications.

If the selling point of any super agent is convenience, then the UI/UX has to serve that ambition in ways that surpass the Alexa model of voice interaction. Human-machine interaction will always be predicated on displaying information, and touch is central to that because, frankly, people like to see, hear, and feel feedback.

The big headache to overcome will be making super agents compliant with strict data and privacy regulations that otherwise make it undesirable for developers to feed large aggregates of information through an AI. But even security could benefit from a good UI/UX if users were given a privacy control panel that looked like a graphic equalizer – accessible, while granting users universal control over their data.

Super apps may not have taken off in the West, but in their place, AI super agents might fulfill the super app promise: to simplify everyday life. After all, technology should not be an end in itself. It should solve genuine problems, not hold you captive to any application or system.

About the Author

Miao Luo is the Director of Technology Strategy at Qt Group.