Super apps are emerging as a distinctive organisational form through which digital platforms expand across sectors and orchestrate increasingly complex ecosystems. Drawing on an ex-ploratory qualitative case analysis of Tencent’s WeChat and Ant Group’s Alipay, the paper develops a process model of super app evolution under regulatory, governance and trust-related constraints. The findings show that super apps evolve in stages rather than through service bundling alone. Platforms first build a trusted core service, then expand into adjacent domains through boundary resources and third-party integration. As ecosystems grow, they must balance openness and control and subsequently adapt governance in response to regula-tory and institutional pressures. Super apps are thus conceptualised as ecosystem catalysts that accelerate value creation, delivery and capture across open and digital ecosystems. The paper further identifies four constellation design principles—competition, collaboration, co-innovation and co-adaptation—that explain how such ecosystems are configured, governed and sustained over time. Overall, the findings offer managers a practical lens for understand-ing how digital platforms can evolve beyond single-purpose applications into resilient cross-sector ecosystems.
Daniel Fasnacht (Fri,) studied this question.