What many people forget about the rebrand from Twitter to X is that Elon Musk did it with clear intent, not on a whim. The goal was for X to become the next WeChat, a so-called Super App. X is now implementing investment and trading services in the app, enhancing functionality and moving a step closer to the envisaged super app (Murphy & Thomas, 2025).
While WeChat has been massively successful and is now all-encompassing in China, executing a similar plan in Western markets such as the USA and the European Union is more challenging. According to Buchanan and Cao (2018), five factors drive Super App sucess: digital-ecosystem characteristics, consumer behaviour, regulatory environment, technological infrastructure, and market maturity. In my view, the most important elements when comparing X to WeChat are regulation and the market maturity.
Regulation in the USA and China differs significantly. While China has applied more relaxed rules to integrating financial services into WeChat, the USA and the European Union enforce stricter laws and regulations (Hutukka, 2024), like the Digital Markets Act, making it more difficult to incorporate such services into platforms like X, preventing one company from easily consolidating so much market power.
Still, this has not made X or Elon Musk back down from the super-app idea. Setting regulation aside, the technical capability and profitability for big tech companies in the USA or Europe should be sufficient, and it would be wrong to assume the West could not deliver. That suggests Western the market maturity of the Western App market may be the sticking point. China is mostly Android (StatCounter, 2025) but without Google’s ecosystem. The is no default Play Store, no Google account that follows you across devices as your identity, and no standard Google Pay wallet. Instead, each phone maker loads its own services (Wang et al., 2018). That vacuum created space for cross-brand platforms, which WeChat and Alipay filled. They were already on every phone, then evolved into de facto operating systems, taking on roles that Google and Apple fill elsewhere. In the rest of the world, those roles are already filled by Apple and Google, so replicating China’s Super App model is, realistically, very unlikely to work.
X can still innovate, but success depends less on copying WeChat and more on building features people genuinely need, without forcing them into an ecosystem they might distrust. A Western super app in my view might be more modular, with interoperability, strong data protection, and partnerships across industries rather than dominance by a single firm.
References
Buchanan, B., & Cao, C. (2018, October 10). Quo Vadis?: A comparison of the fintech revolution in China and the West (SWIFT Institute Working Paper No. 2017-002). SSRN. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3264146
Murphy, H., & Thomas, D. (2025, June 19). Elon Musk’s X to offer investment and trading in ‘super app’ push. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/3615dfe2-f739-44f7-9823-a8acce6c0380
Hutukka, P. (2024). Fintech law in the European Union, the United States and China: Regulation of financial technology in comparative context. Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law, 31(5), 559–594. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1023263X241298416
StatCounter. (2025, August). Mobile operating system market share – China. StatCounter Global Stats. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/china
Wang, H., Liu, Z., Liang, J., Vallina-Rodriguez, N., Guo, Y., Li, L., Tapiador, J. M., Cao, J., & Xu, G. (2018, October). Beyond Google Play: A large-scale comparative study of Chinese Android app markets. In Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC ’18) (pp. 293–307). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3278532.3278558
