76% of Millennials Are Super App Ready

Apps have been a hit from the word go, to wit the typical phone screen is cluttered with dozens of them. It’s a big reason why interest in having a single app that would combine banking, payments, identity and more into a super app would be a big hit.

In the study “Super Apps for the Super Connected,” a PYMNTS and PayPal collaboration, we asked over 9,000 consumers across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany about their appetite for a super app. Extrapolating the results, the study suggested 96 million users would be keen to get their hands on one, in hopes of getting more of the super app experience that is already being widely enjoyed in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Latin American regions.

What also jumps out of the data are generational differences. While not entirely unexpected, they’re still consequential in terms of their importance to business and payments.

Segmenting respondents into three batches — the “basic-tech” group who on average own two connected devices, the “mainstream-tech” group who average four devices, and the “connected-tech” crowd with up to eight devices — guess which is doing it super app-style?

The study stated that 76% of millennials “bought groceries online in the 30 days prior to the study — 65% of baby boomers and seniors did the same. In addition, 70% of millennials across four countries used connected devices to order food from a restaurant, exceeding the 60% of Gen Z consumers who did so.”

Additionally, we found that “one-quarter of all consumers indicated high interest, but 40% of millennials reported being ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ interested in a super app. Just 35% of Gen X and 25% of Gen Z consumers reported the same level of interest.”