Microsoft Working On A Mobile Super App

It Still Won’t Make Bing Useful

Microsoft is working on closing their mobile store gap, several years after bailing on their mobile business completely.  In order to try to compete against Apple and Google they are intending to create a Super App that will “combine shopping, messaging, web search, news feeds and other services” for mobile devices.  How they determined that they are in competition with those two companies for a mobile app store was never actually made clear.

The inspiration for the design of their proposed Super App is Tencent’s WeChat app.  That app does indeed do everything that Microsoft is suggesting their app will do, and some things that they might want to avoid.  For instance, WeChat does not use any form of encryption which many prospective users expect from their chat apps at this point.  It is also heavily censored and closely monitored by the Chinese government, and there have been many accusations of WeChat selling information to third parties; though that is common among most of these types of apps.

It will be interesting to see what Microsoft comes up with, and even more interesting to see how they intend to distribute it, for apart from a few Nokia holdouts, the number of phones with the Microsoft Store installed is miniscule.