In today’s Finshots, we tell you why the Adani Group quietly pulled the plug on its super app dreams and what it really takes to build one that works.

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The Story

Back in 2022, the Adani Group decided it was time to spread its wings in the digital world. As India’s largest private airport operator, they decided to build a digital twin to complement their physical airports. Something that made the entire airport experience smoother and smarter.

And that’s how Adani One took off.

The app promised to be a one-stop shop for travellers. It let users book airline tickets, check flight status, access lounges, shop duty-free, book a cab or even a parking slot at the airport. Basically, everything you’d want as an airport customer, now in one place.

But Adani had bigger dreams. They saw an opportunity in the booming consumer markets of digital payments and e-commerce. So they began building a super app — one that could handle UPI payments, offer shopping through ONDC and become a one-stop digital platform for everything from payments to shopping.

So it wasn’t surprising that Adani poured in money to make this dream a reality — nearly $100 million over the past three years.

But fast forward to now, and that dream’s been grounded.

Earlier this year, the group quietly folded Adani One (which had been running as an independent digital arm) back into its airport business.

So what happened?

Well, the app simply didn’t take off the way they’d hoped. Adani One was ambitiously aiming at a target of 500 million users by 2030. But as of March 2024, it had managed just about 30 million. And when users don’t show up in big numbers, revenue doesn’t either. The path to profitability started looking longer than expected. So the group chose to cut its losses and focus on what it knows best — infrastructure and energy.

But here’s the thing. If you take a step back, Adani’s story isn’t an exception. The entire super app dream hasn’t quite worked out in India.

So what’s going on, and why aren’t such huge companies with deep pockets able to crack the code, you ask?

Well, if you remember, we actually wrote about this way back in 2023. And back then, we pointed out two big reasons why super apps often don’t stick.

First, when you try to cram too many services into a single app, things start to lag. The experience gets clunky, and no one likes that. So users naturally fall back to what works — their go-to apps for individual needs like payments, shopping or bookings.

Second, a lot of these super apps try to launch everything all at once — payments, travel, shopping, news, you name it, without first building a strong core service that pulls people in. They try to spread across too many verticals without nailing even one. And when you do that, you risk becoming a jack of all trades but master of none.

But look, it’s not like these big conglomerates dreamt this up overnight. Their inspiration was most likely something like WeChat, the Chinese super app owned by tech giant Tencent.

So then, why did Tencent manage to turn WeChat into something the Chinese quite literally can’t live without, while Adani with Adani One, Tata with Neu or Reliance with MyJio are still trying to make it work?

To answer that, we’ll need to rewind a bit, and look at how WeChat quietly grew into the beast of a super app that it is today.

See, WeChat started out in 2011 as a basic messaging app. In its early days, it didn’t exactly make waves. It was just another app where you could send texts and photos. And that was a problem because users in China already had their favourites like Feixin, China Mobile’s SMS app or Xiaomi’s MiTalk.

That’s when WeChat knew it had to do something different. So it got creative.

One of its early innovations was a walkie-talkie feature where users could send short voice messages under 60 seconds. It clicked, especially with older professionals who weren’t big on typing and where email wasn’t the default mode of work communication in China. Then came the quirky “shake your phone” feature. It let users shake their phones to connect with others doing the same. It was an odd but fun way to meet strangers and make new friends.

These were small but clever additions. And even though WeChat didn’t have the early advantage, it slowly carved a space for itself. Sure, it also benefitted from the fact that the Chinese government nudged people toward local apps by keeping foreign platforms out. But that alone wasn’t enough. WeChat still had to earn its place in people’s daily lives. And it did that by being creative.

Now compare that with how we use apps here in India. We all have our fixed routines. PhonePe or Google Pay for payments. Swiggy or Zomato when we’re hungry. WhatsApp for messaging. Blinkit, Instamart or Zepto for quick commerce. Most of us don’t even think twice before opening these apps because we’re creatures of habit. And this ‘stickiness’ is exactly why it’s tough for any new player to break in. Unless, of course, they bring something fresh to the table.

Take Adani One, for instance. It launched with travel services — useful, but not something people use every day. Now imagine if it had launched a payments app instead. That would've meant taking on PhonePe and Google Pay head-on. A tough space for sure, but not impossible if approached creatively.

Yup. Think about how PhonePe and Google Pay made us switch in the first place. They offered cashbacks in the form of real money, every time we made a payment. That habit caught on. And even when the cash rewards faded and turned into discount coupons, people stayed because the behaviour was already locked in.

And that’s exactly what these big conglomerates need to learn. They have to start thinking like creative startups — the kind that want to break the mould and build something people actually love.

In fact, that’s what WeChat did too.

It rolled out features step by step that weren’t just useful but also unique. And one of its most iconic moves was a little thing called ‘Red Packets’.

For context, in China, gifting red envelopes or hóngbāo filled with money is a long-standing tradition. So before the 2014 Lunar New Year, Tencent’s team reimagined this custom for the digital age. It wasn’t just about sending money. It was designed to be fun.

Users could send fixed amounts on individual or group chats, but with a twist. You could drop $10 into a group of ten friends and let the app split it equally. Or… you could randomise it. Maybe the fastest two people to tap on the envelope get $5 each. Or the first one grabs $7 while the rest share the scraps. The packets also expired in 24 hours, creating urgency. And since no one knew how much they’d get until after they tapped, it came with an addictive, lottery-like thrill.

It became such a hit that third-party apps even popped up to help people grab Red Packets without unlocking their phones.

Within two days of launching Red Packets, WeChat added nearly 5 million users and even threatened Alipay’s dominance (the go-to mobile payments app in China at the time).

So yeah, Red Packets didn’t just get WeChat more users. It got them loyal ones who stuck around. And that gave Tencent the perfect runway to roll out even more features like mini programs — tiny apps under 10MB that run seamlessly within WeChat. Whether it’s ordering food, shopping online, booking a cab or a doctor’s appointment, you could do it all without ever leaving the interface.

And when one feature began to feel stale, they’d come up with something fresher and even better.

And this is probably what it takes to build a super app that sticks in India. Conglomerates need to find that one service people use in their daily lives, launch it, but in a way that stands out from the rest to win market share and user trust. And then, they have to keep innovating to build something truly successful.

Because no matter how much money is poured into a boring idea, it won’t go far.

We’ll just have to wait and see which of these conglomerates cracks the code to build a super app that actually works.

Until then…

P.S.: Guess who already has the basics in place to build one? Reliance.

Just think about it. It has JioPay, JioHotstar, JioChat — services people use every day, plus a massive customer base through SIMs and retail stores. If they can add just one more ingredient—creativity, they might just be able to pull off what WeChat did in China. And if that happens, maybe they’ll set the benchmark for Tata, Adani and the rest. What say?

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