WeChat

The messaging app that ate China - and reorganized an entire economy around its platform.

Launched in 2011 by Tencent as a messaging app, WeChat evolved into comprehensive infrastructure: payments, banking, wealth management, insurance, e-commerce, food delivery, government services, and 30+ other categories accessed through mini-programs within WeChat's environment. With 1.3 billion monthly active users, WeChat isn't a product - it's an ecosystem. The Chinese economy reorganized around WeChat Pay ($17 trillion processed in 2020), leapfrogging credit cards entirely. Street vendors, government offices, and beggars display QR codes.

This is trophic cascade at scale. WeChat's dominance at Level 4 (super-app aggregator) transformed every level below it. Restaurants, retailers, and service providers that don't integrate with WeChat don't exist to most Chinese consumers. The platform demonstrates what happens when a single company captures the aggregation layer: the entire ecosystem reorganizes around that chokepoint.

What's fascinating: despite different starting points, WeChat (messaging), Revolut (banking), Paytm (payments), and Grab (mobility) all converged toward integrated financial super-apps. Environmental pressures - mobile adoption, emerging market leapfrogging, consumer demand for integrated experiences - created a fitness peak, and companies climbed toward it from different directions.

The lesson: super-apps don't compete in categories - they reorganize ecosystems. And convergent evolution toward super-apps suggests this is the dominant form for mobile-first emerging markets. The question isn't whether to build a super-app; it's whether your regulatory environment and market structure allow it.