Silicon Valley has spent years obsessing over “super apps” that can do it all. AI is powering a new version of that dream.
Just take Google, which last week did the most Google thing it could: it killed a product.
This wasn’t your textbook Google assassination. The company announced it was axing its new AI Studio app — a mobile companion to its AI developer playground — before it even launched, despite 800,000 people having pre-installed it.
The decision came with an explanation: rather than asking users to download yet another app, Google said it wanted to take an approach “where apps emerge naturally, in the course of your everyday conversations with Gemini.” In other words, it’s going to combine AI Studio into Google’s main Gemini app.
Google is just the latest example of a company moving from many products to an app that can do it all. AI is central to this strategy.
Microsoft’s ‘super app’ plan
OpenAI has been talking about this a lot lately. Last month, it launched a new agent that combines its chat and work functions, named ChatGPT Work. It also killed its Atlas browser and said it would migrate some of the functions into the ChatGPT app. Anthropic also recently announced it would merge Claude chat and Cowork.
Microsoft’s at it, too. CEO Satya Nadella said on the company’s recent earnings call that the company would combine Copilot’s function into what he explicitly described as a “super app.” (Even Disney reportedly wants in, although not for AI purposes)
China’s WeChat, which provides payments, messaging, and social media all in one place, was for a long time the blueprint for Silicon Valley’s super app obsession. Elon Musk has talked extensively about his ambitions to turn X into an “everything app” offering a similar spread of services. It recently launched a payments service and has been absorbing features from its AI tool Grok.
PayPal took a swing at building a one-stop shop for payment and commerce in 2021, although it didn’t quite pan out. Meta, for a time, took a similar bet on Messenger.
The AI super app era
AI could make the super app dream come true. With AI moving from chatbots to agents capable of performing an increasingly wide range of tasks, such as coding or writing reports, it makes sense to consolidate services in one place. It could also help companies more easily lock users into their ecosystem.
Right now, these apps may not be able to hail a taxi for you or pay your utility bill à la WeChat, but as agents become more capable of working with outside services — and we’re able to chat with more apps from within the AI interface — those ideas are increasingly possible.
From a business perspective, building one app to rule them all may require more discipline, particularly for larger companies with more teams and roadmaps to unify. Google is famous for launching multiple and often confusing versions of the same product (a museum of Google’s messaging platforms alone would kill half a day), owing to its sprawling and often bureaucratic empire.
As its rivals double down on a more unified experience, Google knows it needs to follow. Logan Kilpatrick, a member of technical staff at Google who leads AI Studio, marked the moment last month in a post on X: “we have now entered the super app era.”
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