Super apps have become a defining feature of digital ecosystems and an integral part of everyday life for millions of users, yet scholarship on the topic remains fragmented across disciplines and regions. This paper provides a multidisciplinary, PRISMA-guided systematic review of 177 publications and maps the field through a structured bibliographic analysis and a qualitative synthesis of a subset of 126 papers from the social sciences and legal studies. Our results reveal significant imbalances in the literature: a pronounced focus on Asian markets and few super app case studies (i.e. WeChat, KakaoTalk, LINE), as well as uneven coverage across service domains. We outline the key factors shaping user adoption and continued use, and summarize how prevailing platform strategies, often built around closed ecosystems, raise questions about competition, data governance, and systemic resilience. Beyond commercial platforms, municipalities and agencies are beginning to assemble ‘local super apps’ that unify public-service access, signaling a parallel public sector trajectory. Our results serve as an accessible entry point to the super app literature and set out clear lines for future research, calling for stronger interdisciplinary designs, comparative work beyond Asia, better conceptualizations of super apps, and more robust evaluations of societal, regulatory, and welfare impacts.
Hasselwander et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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