Middle East Consumers Are Excited for Super Apps But Have High Expectations for Application Capabilities

Smartphone users, on average, unlock their devices 150 times a day! Whether it is getting up to date with the latest news, connecting with friends, ordering a taxi, or booking movie tickets for the month’s blockbuster, increasingly it’s via applications that consumers now work and play.

With the Middle East’s youthful population demographic and impressively high degree of smartphone and internet penetration, this dependence on digital services is even more pronounced than in other regions. Concurrently, leading brands are seeing the potential to capitalise on this and are creating innovative and compelling digital experiences. Exposed to exceptional experiences, consumers increasingly expect all digital services to match up. And if brands are to win over this more discerning consumer, they need to consistently go the extra mile, delivering even more intuitive and personalised digital experiences.

Increasingly, Super Apps are becoming the ‘holy grail’ for big brands that hope to become the one-stop hope for a consumer’s every need. These are applications that bring together multiple digital services into a single application wrapper. The latest research from Cisco, The App Attention Index 2023: Beware the Application Generation, reveals there is growing consumer interest and appetite for Super Apps, which they anticipate could deliver a wide range of exciting benefits. Major players in the space — from Careem and Noon to STC Pay and Halan — are making their play for a piece of the Super App pie.

However, the study also makes it clear that consumers now have zero patience or tolerance for applications that don’t perform as they should. People feel disrespected and let down when they encounter bad digital experiences, and they’re increasingly looking to punish brands whose applications let them down. Significantly, the study finds these feelings are heightened when it comes to use of Super Apps, with consumers pointing to additional inconvenience and frustration if Super Apps don’t work properly.

With the potential to be relevant to such a large portion of the region’s consumer base, brands have ample reason to pursue the opportunity that Super Apps afford. But those embarking on this journey must recognise the warning: any disruption or downtime to these applications will result in strong reactions from consumers and, ultimately, reputational and financial damage.

The global rise of Super Apps

Much of the maturity we see in the Super App space has been driven by companies operating in Asian markets. While progress in regions such as the Middle East, North America and Europe has been slower than in Asia due to market fragmentation, regulatory pressures and legacy technology issues, things are likely to speed up over the next few years. Similarly, Gartner predicts that approximately 50% of the world’s population will engage with more than one Super App by 2027.

Though this projected date is now just three years away, our study backs up this optimistic assessment. 73% of consumers say they feel positive about the prospect of using Super Apps — a figure that shoots up to 80% for consumers ages 18 to 34. People point to a broad range of benefits they believe Super Apps can offer, including saving time and simplifying their lives. Unsurprisingly, with data pointing to  9 in 10 UAE organisations now offering an application, a major factor driving the demand for Super Apps is also consumers’ desire to reduce ‘application clutter’.

Super Apps amplify the impact of poor performance

As applications have transformed from enhancing, to now very much enabling, the many conveniences of modern life, consumers expectations have skyrocketed. 62% claim their expectations for digital experiences are far higher now than they were two years ago, and 64% state they are now less forgiving towards brands whose applications don’t perform.

Alarmingly, however, digital disruption has actually increased over the last two years — 88% of consumers have experienced performance issues when using applications over the past 12 months compared to 81% in 2021. No wonder then that people are becoming increasingly frustrated. Their expectations are going in one direction, while application performance appears to be heading in the other. And with frustration growing, consumers are fighting back, making it their mission to hold any brand whose application lets them down accountable.

With so many viable alternatives out there, consumers are quick to turn their back on poorly performing digital services. 77% have stopped using applications from their devices as a result of performance issues over the last 12 months and, on average, people have deleted more than five applications. In some circumstances, where they are locked into relationships with service providers — such as banks and mobile network operators — consumers are actually ditching digital services altogether and switching back to alternatives like branches and stores or calling contact centres.

In the case of Super Apps, the impact of issues are amplified simply because these applications combine so many critical functions into a single package. Consumers therefore feel any disruption or downtime with these applications would be even more frustrating and their reactions would be even more extreme. And here’s an interesting caveat for brands that opt to be a part of a larger Super App ecosystem — 53% of consumers state that if a Super App didn’t perform properly, they would have negative feelings towards all the brands associated with the application.

Application performance and security must prevail

Against these odds and expectations, if Super Apps hope to succeed, application owners must deliver the very best, most seamless and secure digital experiences. However, optimising application performance is easier said than done. With the rise of cloud-native technologies, technologists are having to manage an increasingly complex and dispersed application environment. IT teams are burdened by a lack of visibility into applications running across hybrid environments, which makes it challenging to identify and resolve problems before they harm the end-user experience.

Fortunately, there is a clear and efficient solution to these challenges — Application Observability. It generates full and unified visibility across both cloud native and on-premises environments, so technologists can rapidly detect faults and understand their causes. Additionally, by correlating application availability, performance, and security data with key business metrics, IT teams can recognise and prioritise issues which threaten customers and the business.

The Middle East mobile marketplace is primed to enable Super Apps to skyrocket to success. But if brands hope to achieve such stellar ambitions, they need to recognise that application performance and security is key to delivering on this opportunity. Only those who can consistently deliver seamless and secure digital experiences will thrive in the age of the Super App.