Elon Musk’s improbable path to making X an “everything app”

X used to be called Twitter, but soon it will become "the Everything App," and that day is "closer than everyone thinks," X CEO Linda Yaccarino promised in one of her first X posts of 2024.

 

"Nothing can slow us down," Yaccarino said.

 

Turning Twitter into an everything app is arguably the reason that Elon Musk purchased Twitter. He openly craved the success of the Chinese everything app WeChat, telling Twitter staff soon after purchasing the app that "you basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success,” The Guardian reported.

 

In October 2022, Musk teased that he "could be wrong," but he expected that within three to five years, he could turn Twitter into an everything app (also known as a super app). But more than a year later, X still seems far away from following in WeChat's footsteps.

 

Musk's grand vision has always been to morph the bird app—a mostly unprofitable place where users initially went to tweet "short bursts of inconsequential information"—into something hugely profitable: The only app a user would ever need in daily life.

 

To Musk, this meant that users wouldn't just be opening X to post a joke or confirm an earthquake just hit, giving X a little ad revenue with each login. Instead, the app would become users' exclusive destination to place calls, text, goof off with friends, send payments, bank, and, of course, shop online—giving X seemingly boundless opportunities to profit more from each login. It could even turn X into a trillion-dollar company, Musk has claimed.

 

While many wonder how X could achieve this seemingly impossible dream, Sangeet Paul Choudary, a global expert on platform economics and network effects, told Ars that X is well-positioned to become a super app, although he remains skeptical that it will make all the right moves.

 

If X can avoid some of the missteps that led other wannabe super apps to fail, as Choudary wrote in his Substack last November—such as tacking on features that don't leverage the unique relationship between accounts and followers that made Twitter so popular in the first place—Choudary sees at least one path where X could succeed.

X’s potential path to becoming an everything app

Right now, when you open the X app, you see a pair of social media feeds that you can toggle between—the "for you" and "following" feeds—as well as options to post, search, and use Grok, X's chatbot. If you click on your profile in the app, you can access a separate menu to jump to other X features, like Spaces or Communities, or, if you're an eligible creator, you can check out how the monetization of your posts is going.

 

X may simply continue adding features one by one to whatever menus currently exist on the app. But it's also possible that X could get a total makeover by the end of 2024—with potentially more options to access payment features coming soon that might expand its creator economy and fuel an as-yet unexplored world of X e-commerce options. By 2030, X might morph so much—and possibly become so consequential to some users' daily lives—that people could finally respect Musk's X rebrand and stop calling his app by its former name, Twitter.

 

Whichever route X takes, the company needs to be strategic at every step, Choudary told Ars, if it wants to be a super app. For example, just adding a Buy button on X's interface—like Twitter already tried to do with Stripe—or attempting "to become the next PayPal embedded in a social network" would likely fail. But "if it gets its ducks in a row, I could see X moving in the direction of a creator monetization network where creators who have built followership on X can now monetize it," Choudary said. Taking that route, X could potentially succeed as a super app by adding features that directly support creators and then widely catch on with other users.

 

"I really believe the opportunity is in creating an all-in destination for creators and influencers where they can build not just a following but also monetize it," Choudary said. Especially if X builds out a creator success team to identify creators' "needs and pain points" and then highlight any "adjacency opportunities there for the super app."

 

Hyping X to creators might be hard, though, if X remains mysterious about the everything app that Yaccarino claims is coming soon. And although WeChat may be the best model for what to expect for X as a super app, X users can't just casually download the app to see what X might become. China-owned WeChat is notoriously hard to access in the US, even for researchers, because the Chinese government tightly controls China's Internet, primarily to censor Chinese government criticism.

 

A research director investigating human rights issues within China for the nonprofit Freedom House, Yaqiu Wang, told Ars that there are many reasons why "it's very, very hard to do research on social media in China," and when it comes to studying WeChat, maintaining access to the app might be the hardest part.

 

To access Chinese social media apps, China typically requires a Chinese phone number that must be verified by the Chinese government. Anyone who downloads WeChat in the US would need to find an existing WeChat user to scan a code just to set up an account, which is cumbersome for anyone without friends already using the app.

 

Because it's so hard to access WeChat, many US users hoping to peer into X's future would have to settle for looking at screenshots of WeChat posted in app stores or shared in media reports or academic journals.

 

These screenshots suggest that one day in the next few years, you might toggle away from posting a meme on X to order an Uber or pay your utility bills directly from your digital wallet's interface within the app. And rather than installing apps that take up space on your phone's home screen, you might scan QR codes to instead launch an array of sub-applications that operate within the X app's user interface.

 

Although that sounds potentially more efficient than navigating a mobile phone operating system, does anyone in the US even want one app to rule them all?

 

While it's obvious that X is racing to build its everything app, what's less clear is who will buy into it. The major selling point appears to be convenience, but any perceived security and privacy risks from loading all your user data into one app may outweigh that benefit for increasingly privacy-conscious consumers. Add to that X's recent history of random account suspensions, which could make consumers even more wary of buying into X as an everything app that users can depend on to manage their daily online lives.

X following WeChat’s playbook

WeChat is an international app that operates two services: one, known as Weixin, for Chinese users and the other for users located outside of China. The app boasts 1.33 billion monthly active users worldwide, appealing to anyone with a relationship with China, including journalists, activists, diplomats, and people who do business in China, Citizen Lab reported.

 

Musk's projected five-year timeline to turn X into an everything app appears to be ripped straight from WeChat's playbook. After launching WeChat globally in 2012 as a messaging and photo-sharing app, Tencent rolled out voice messaging, then payments services, before launching mini programs—essentially sub-applications accessible within the WeChat app—in 2017. This would arguably become the feature that exploded WeChat's popularity—with Tencent pushing businesses globally to develop mini programs—and cemented its status as an everything app.

 

By 2018, WeChat had attracted over a billion monthly active users globally, with mini programs offering users a path to avoid wasting time installing apps or connecting payments services. Instead, users could seamlessly navigate the web via WeChat while businesses escaped the chore of developing and maintaining apps to complete online orders.

 

Mini programs also helped WeChat establish dominance in offline payments, the Harvard Business Review noted in 2019. In 2020, the Channels feature launched as Tencent's response to TikTok. In addition to entertaining users, WeChat's short video feature also provided another path for brands to market products to users. And while the recent rollout of TikTok Shop has seemed shaky—with some TikTok users loudly complaining about feeds being flooded by videos pushing products—WeChat's users fully entrenched in the app's interface seemed more conditioned to embrace new shopping features.

 

"It's sophisticated and advanced and easy to use," Wang told Ars.

 

X declined multiple requests to comment, but Musk seems to have taken note of all of this.

 

So far, X has emulated WeChat by launching audio and video calls in 2023. Next, Musk plans to launch payment services, expecting that many users will choose to live their “entire financial life” on X by the end of 2024.

 

And Musk has already hinted at more ambitious features that may function like WeChat's mini programs—a step that could help X reach super app status. During his first Twitter staff meeting, Musk pitched a plan for Twitter to go beyond promoting products in ads. Musk envisioned Twitter as becoming a platform, like WeChat, where users could immediately purchase products with one click, directly on the platform, using funds stored on the platform.

 

"If I saw ads for gizmos—I love gizmos, of course—I’d buy them all in a click," Musk told Twitter staff.

 

Choudary told Ars that X payments probably won't take off if Musk just adds a "buy" button, though.

 

"There needs to be a core payments-driven use case that is embedded into the core app usage dynamic," Choudary said, which would mean, for the payments product to catch on, it would need to become a valued part of the everyday X users' engagements with their followers.

 

Choudary pointed to WeChat's success after launching its payments system with a novel payments product called red packets in 2014. These were digital gifts designed to look like red envelopes that are typically used to gift cash to children or elderly people in China and were initially advertised as a way to gift money to individuals or groups of users to celebrate the Chinese New Year.

 

Over time, the functionality of sending red packets shifted, as, particularly for groups, it "became wildly popular through a lottery-style gaming dynamic, where senders could specify the total gift amount, message, and the number of winners, with each prize randomized by the platform," Choudary said.

 

Tencent explained in a blog about how red packets became a "big hit" and that this worked by providing red packets "settings for variable amounts, which depend largely on the luck of the draw. For example, you can send red packets worth RMB100 in total to a group of 10 people and specify that you want the money, in random amounts, to go to the first five people to open the packet. One might receive RMB65, another RMB6.5, while others receive amounts as small as RMB0.01."

 

With a chance to win money, even people who had little or no money were encouraged to use the feature and connect their banks to WeChat. This paved the way for broader adoption by tapping into a gaming dynamic that was initially clearly tied to WeChat's core use: messaging with friends and family.

 

If X finds a way to mimic that strategy and roll out payments connected to its core use case—one user connecting with many followers—its payments product could hook enough users, who might then consider using X as their primary payments product, Choudary suggested.

 

"Payments cannot just be bolted on," he said. "The leading-in use case should be organic and unique to the usage of Twitter, much like the gifting game leveraged WeChat's usage dynamic."

 

X's potential for growth in payments could be great. Jeffrey Towson, a managing partner at TechMoat Consulting and expert at monitoring digital strategies in the US and China, told Ars that WeChat makes a ton of money from in-app purchases. Since 2019, when global in-app purchases generated only $1 million, WeChat's revenue from such payments has surged, soaring above $71 million last year, according to Statista. But Towson agrees with Choudary that it won't be easy for X to replicate that success.

 

"WeChat was a unique China phenomenon," Towson told Ars. "No company anywhere in the world has been able to replicate WeChat's unique development path," which was built on "two powerful utility services, messenger and payments," Towson said.

 

"Those services are both usually oligopolies"—meaning markets dominated by very few suppliers—"with big network effects, which make each difficult to break into," Towson said. "Let alone both."

 

Towson noted that "X is building from a completely different foundation," starting "as an audience builder platform that connects content creators and consumers" and becoming "a source of real-time information [and] news" to "increasingly like-minded users."

 

Now X is innovating at a "frantic pace" to attract and engage more users by adding features on a monthly basis, representing "a sea change from the previous decade of stagnation at Twitter," Towson said. X could make big moves, like emphasizing short video, to "enrich its core features" and "increase user numbers and engagement," Towson said. Especially "on the content creator" side, Towson agreed with Choudary, saying, "the biggest improvements" that X "can make are growing the audience size and increasing the revenue-generation opportunities."

 

But X needing to break into both messaging and payments to reach super-app glory will be major hurdles, Towson expects.

 

"I don’t think X can replicate WeChat easily," Towson told Ars, suggesting that "WhatsApp might be the only app that could copy WeChat. But they've been pretty much a disaster in terms of their ability to innovate."

 

It's possible that X's most loyal users might be rewarded for sticking around long enough to see Musk overcome these hurdles where all other Western companies attempting to launch super apps have failed.

 

"X is currently the most dynamic and also most unpredictable player on the field," Towson said. "That’s generally good for users. But it's a bumpy ride."

 

However, those X users would also need to view the platform as reliable and dependable enough to trust with their entire daily online lives. And while Yaccarino suggests that "nothing" can slow X down, a top concern for WeChat users—censorship-driven account suspensions—seems to demonstrate that a big problem for Musk's everything app plan might be X's automated spam detector, which the company continually blames for causing accounts to be suspended randomly.

Suspensions WeChat users’ top concern

Because Tencent must adhere to Chinese laws requiring constant surveillance and immediate censorship of users perceived as critical of the Chinese government, the threat of WeChat censorship keeps escalating, a 2023 Freedom House report said.

 

According to Freedom House, WeChat's messaging services became so popular—hosting more than a third of China's data traffic, WalkTheChat estimated in 2018—partly because China's Great Firewall blocks other platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, X, Telegram, and Signal.

 

Blocking popular platforms pushes Chinese users onto WeChat, where they are subject to intensifying censorship, Freedom House reported. In 2023, the censorship seemed to reach a new extreme, with Freedom House finding account closures increasingly used as a first resort, while content removals spiked and started "extending to topics that were previously uncensored."

 

Facing the risk that the Chinese government might not just delete posts but disable their accounts, WeChat users in China are "increasingly self-censoring to preempt the closure of their accounts or other penalties, since WeChat is relied on for a wide variety of services that include messaging, banking, ride-hailing, ordering food, and booking travel," Freedom House reported.

 

Even mundane political talk could get someone booted from WeChat, the South China Morning Post reported. One WeChat user was reportedly "sentenced to nearly four years in prison for sharing a video" about a religious practice on the app, Freedom House noted.

 

While Tencent differentiates between Weixin and WeChat services in terms of where data is stored, researchers at Citizen Lab—whose work focuses on "the intersection of information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security"—have noted that "the boundary between these two 'services' are not clear." Both services, Citizen Lab observed, "mostly use the same set of servers" and the same features, and users of both services have been subjected to Chinese government censorship, Citizen Lab found.

 

Tencent declined to comment on Freedom House's and Citizen Lab's reports.

X users suspended with no explanation

On X, censorship remains a testy topic for Musk, who has recently claimed that the "Western World" has a choice to make between embracing "freedom of speech" on X or ceding "control" over their content to other platforms.

 

Some X users criticized the company on Yaccarino's post touting the "everything app," including journalist Dan Nguyen, who wrote that X lacked transparency when suspending users who have accused the platform of censoring them. Earlier this year, multiple journalists critical of X were suspended "with no explanation," Vice reported. More recently, Yulia Navalnaya—the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny—had her account temporarily suspended a day after joining X.

 

"Providing transparency into suspensions and shadow bans was one of Elon’s first promises when he bought Twitter," Nguyen wrote. "That hasn’t happened, but yeah, sure, everyone can’t wait to do their banking on X.”

 

Musk later blamed these suspensions on an error with X's automated spam detector.

 

"We do sweeps for spam/scam accounts and sometimes real accounts get caught up in them," Musk posted on X.

 

After Navalnaya's suspension, X's Safety account promised the app would "be updating" the "platform's defense mechanism against manipulation and spam," but one of the top comments on that post suggested that some users weren't satisfied.

 

"These errors by X cannot just be brushed aside since for every known account that gets corrected in short order, how many lesser known accounts go unfixed due to lack of reach?" an X user called @DareWeCan posted.

 

And those aren't the only seemingly random suspensions on X. This March, other users were shocked to have their accounts locked or suspended after outing an anonymous neo-Nazi cartoonist. X's head of business operations, Joe Benarroch, released a statement saying that the users were suspended because they violated X's policies against sharing private information. But that policy specifically said that sharing someone's name was not considered a violation, and after users called out X, the platform updated that policy to retroactively justify banning users who identified an anonymous user. Like WeChat's users, X's users were seemingly suspended for conduct that they did not know could result in suspensions.

 

Around the same time, X confirmed that "some users are encountering an error when logging into X or creating a new account. We’re working on it and will share an update when things are back to normal." Days later, there has not been an update as of this writing, so it's unclear if X ever fully resolved the issue.

 

As X tries to evolve into the super app of Musk's dreams, the question remains whether US users with access to a wide array of popular apps would buy into a super app where they might be suddenly suspended or unable to log in without warning and disconnected from their "entire" online life with no explanation.

 

Choudary told Ars that he wouldn't expect X appearing unreliable to some users to be a real "barrier" to its transition to a super app, though, because "there's a large user base for which X is very much a primary interface—suspensions and outages notwithstanding." The failure of Twitter alternatives to capture X's audience seems to back up this idea.

 

"I don't see X having a problem retaining its users like some of these super app wannabes do," Choudary told Ars, agreeing with Towson that "users are loyal to X."

 

If X can strategically hook users on payments products and new features that continue supporting the follower-based social networking use case, the platform may succeed as a super app, where other apps, including Facebook, have failed. That's especially true if payments end up positioning X "for a move into e-commerce via mini programs," Towson said, "just like WeChat."

 

But just because X becomes a super app doesn't guarantee it will become the next WeChat, Choudary said.

 

WeChat is "relatively unique" among super apps, he said, "because of scale in a closed market with limited competition" in China, where other popular apps are blocked. And because "Chinese and Japanese digital interfaces thrive in clutter"—delivering an information overload—whereas "in general, apps in the West (and most non-Asian markets) tend to be sliver-thin, unbundled, focused on a single use case."

 

"Western super-app efforts lack both these advantages," Choudary said.

 

So while it's possible that X and other wannabe super apps can "increase customer retention and lifetime value by expanding to adjacencies and becoming super apps," Choudary said, X actually achieving WeChat-level success will likely remain out of reach.

 

"Can they be as successful as WeChat?" Choudary said. "I'm very confident that they won't."