Google Maps Is Ready to Transform the World of Superapps: A Skift Deep Dive

If you live in the West and parts of Asia and Africa, you take the Google Maps app everywhere you go, stuffed in a pocket or clutched in a hand. And its utility is indeed on the mark: Need to navigate to work or somewhere else in a car or train or on foot? Just whip out Google Maps, and let it transport you from Point A to B and C.

Likewise, if you own a restaurant, bar, spa, beauty supply store, tourist attraction, event venue, or hotel, or offer services to any of these sectors, you’ll want to have a Google business listing, which gets you into the Google Maps app for discovery purposes. After all, consider that “near me” searches on Google Maps grew 150 percent over the prior year, Google parent Alphabet’s chief financial officer Ruth M. Porat said at an investor conference in early 2018.

Like Tencent-owned WeChat and, to a lesser extent Meituan in China, as well as Grab in Southeast Asia, many are pointing to Google Maps, with its more than 1 billion users, as the next ubiquitous, all-encompassing superapp. In other words, a superapp can do it all, or nearly everything, relatively speaking, and obviates the need to call up specialty apps to perform specific tasks.

Need your Chicago Transit, Uber, or Yelp apps to see if your train is delayed, book a rideshare, or reserve a table for a Saturday night repast? Not really. Google Maps has you basically covered on all these fronts — and many more.

Our reporting finds that Alphabet is already generating several billion dollars annually from Google Maps, an amount that isn’t yet material to the company’s financial results. But although officials state they are taking a leisurely approach to monetizing Google Maps, which is a core part of Alphabet’s search business, revenue is picking up at a healthy pace as Google experiments with new local ad formats within Google Maps. As Google Maps gets around to targeting more verticals, the only thing that might stand in its way from becoming a ubiquitous superapp may be users’ mobile behavior and regulators looking to break up big tech.

Superapps are having a signature moment, although mostly in Asia. The WeChat app, for example, has evolved into a quasi-operating system in China, dominating messaging and file sharing, and its mini programs — currently more than 1 million of them — serve as a portal for 200 million users daily to the wider economy, with virtually every major brand having a prese