The Super-App Dream Is Quietly Unbundling in Lagos, One Tab at a Time

For five years, the strategy was addition. Payments apps added ride-hailing, ride-hailing added food, food added lending, and every deck contained a slide about becoming the everything app. This year, three of Nigeria's largest consumer apps have gone the other way and started removing tabs.

The usage data explains why. An analysis of session data from 1.2 million users, compiled by the mobile analytics firm Kanwa and shared with Afrikons, found that 84% of users who opened a multi-service app in a given month used exactly one service. Cross-service adoption — the entire premise of the bundle — sat at 7% and had not moved in two years despite heavy in-app promotion.

"We spent eleven engineering months on a travel booking tab that 0.9% of monthly actives ever opened," said a product lead at one of the three companies, who was not authorized to discuss internal metrics. "Meanwhile the transfer flow, which everybody uses every day, had a bug we had deprioritized four times. That is a strategy problem, not a resourcing problem."

Removing features is unpopular internally and invisible externally, which is why it rarely happens. But the apps that have done it report faster load times, smaller install sizes — a real constraint on entry-level Android — and, in two cases, higher retention on the core service. The everything app may yet arrive on this continent. It will not arrive by accretion.