Messaging Platforms Leaving the Single App Strategy

When you are huge, you don’t need to care about numbers.

Line corporation apps

There are two extremes in app development:

1. Bundle everything you’ve got into a super-app
2. Put each feature in an app of its own

I wrote about how messaging are becoming platforms on NoJitter, and it seems that one way for them to expand is through multiple apps.

Do one thing and do it well. This is how we are taught it school to write our mobile apps. They say the screen is too small, and the user experience has to be perfect, so the app must be focused on the one thing.

A platform cannot do only one thing. Especially not if it is of the messaging kind. The business models and activities in messaging platforms now include:

• Stickers (with a marketplace for stickers)
• Brand pages
• Ad campaigns
• Gaming
• Virtual currency
• Mobile payments
• E-commerce
• Flash sales
• IoT, smart TV and device connectivity
• Taxi hailing
• Translation
• CRM integration

And that list grows every day.

With such a long list, a single app may not fit very well any more. Sirgoo Lee, Co-CEO of Kakao, wrote a great piece on this subject exactly – Forget ‘unbundling’:

We’ve learned that on mobile, the highest engagement happens with a single purpose app. This stems from the basic difference between user behavior on a desktop vs. on mobile.

[…]

When you embark on a multi-app strategy, be prepared to experiment and make mistakes.

The whole post is well worth reading. It explains Kakao’s strategy in feature development and creation of new apps and also touches the experimental nature of the messaging market in pursuing new business models.

I guess the largest hurdle to the unbundling of an application, or to the multi app strategy for a mobile platform is the ability to attract the same user base for the new apps that get introduced to the market.

Seen through this prism, the move of Facebook to unbundle its messaging to a separate app does make sense.

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While we’re at it, this unbundling seems to be happening for companies as well – HP splitting up and eBay & PayPal breaking up.