It is undeniable, that Gojek and Grab kinds of services as the top of mind are getting high awareness among users due to flexibility and simplicity offered within just one platform. Each platform is claimed to be the super app, not only just a ride-hailing tool, and has accommodated various services in the application.

Gojek’s Co-Founder who is recently appointed as Indonesia’s Minister of Education and Culture, Nadiem Makarim said in an interview that an application capable to be the one-for-all services would create a great potential in Indonesia.

“When you digitize human movement and trace back transactions, you create a new visibility level and understand very clearly how each city operates,” he said.

A similar statement comes from Grab’s CEO, Anthony Tan. He thought as the number of young users grows, it actually changes the habit and lifestyle in more digital ways. Through smartphones and apps, the data collected can be very useful for service development.

Starts in China

Since China, many applications have emerged offering solutions and provide more than one service. The term super app began to extend and happened to capture as much attention from people.

Super app has created a relevant ecosystem and needed on a daily basis. Starts from purchasing groceries, transportation, shopping and payment to the extent of entertainment.

Today, the super app model is rapidly growing in the emerging market, such as India, South America, and Southeast Asia. Its focus is on making horizontal expansion and dominating certain geographic spots aggressively. Eventually, with the right and relevant features and categories, the super app is predicted to be the future technology.

The Future Technology

Using the super app framework as the direction of many technology startups, it’ll be wiser for those startups, corporates, and brands to collaborate and create an application with a one-stop-shopping concept.

Gojek, for example, has partnered up with cinemas, health consulting service, and drug purchasing, also the news portal for users can stay longer in the application.

Grab, on the other side, provides grocery service with GrabFresh in collaboration with HappyFresh. Partnering with Grab allows HappyFresh to add more slots in the sales, also to improve delivery time.

HappyFresh’s CEO, Guillem Segarra said, the partnership approach, as the one with Grab, will give consumers easier access to groceries from their currently used app, without having to download the HappyFresh app.

“We believe in the partnership approach and it has proven with Grab. They are very helpful towards us getting new users. Hereby, we decided to stay open to other platforms with lots of user base,” He added.

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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian