Why Lite apps are making a comeback

A brief history of Super Apps and why lite apps are required to make a comeback.

We are almost nearing the end of 2022 and I have a feeling that mobile apps will continue to bloat and occupy all of our mobile phone stores in the coming years. There is no denying that apps have become admiringly interactive, packing in a lot more features that allow us to achieve more things than ever before. Android phones and iPhones have started offering 256GB and 512GB models, and yet they are not enough. These apps keep occupying more space in our lives and our phones. In this post, I will be discussing the rise of super-apps, differences between native and lite/instant apps, and more reasons to adopt the lite apps beyond just saving on storage space. So let’s get cracking.

Rise & Fall of Super Apps

During the summer holidays when I was taking Japanese language classes, one of the students who have been to Japan started telling me enthusiastically about this app named LINE which is a super app of sorts. It had everything he said and is much more advanced than any of the mobile apps I have seen during those times. LINE-app like China’s WeChat and South Korea’s KakaoTalk is a chat apps that grew into a hub for entertainment, social and day-to-day activities. Imagine YouTube, Spotify, WhatsApp, Instagram, Reddit, Clubhouse, and Uber all combined into a single bundle. It was fascinating.

But there was one downside — the app size. It was a gigantic 100MB and the argument that was used during those days was that you don’t need any other app once you install this enormous app. Like most people, I was sold on the idea as well. Storage was expensive in those days and saving on the number of mobile apps installed was a massive win.

Slowly though times changed and mobile storage and data became cheap. Consumers no longer needed to install these massive apps. They can easily afford to install multiple apps. One for ride-hailing and other for food delivery and another one for the neo-banking wallet. But there are still super apps that exist in different markets that continue to boast a large feature set and command a large chunk of the market. See a snapshot of the list below 👇.