In July 2023, Elon Musk announced a bold move: Twitter would rebrand to X and evolve into an “everything app”. X introduced monthly subscription fees for premium features, launched its own generative AI system, and announced plans for peer-to-peer payments and financial services. Yet within months, the platform faced advertiser boycotts, revenue declines, massive layoffs, plunging valuations, and heightened regulatory scrutiny over disinformation and harmful content.
What went wrong? The reasons are complex, but one lesson stands out: being an “everything app” is much harder than it sounds. Twitter was exceptionally good at one thing—enabling public conversation and engagement. The pivot towards a universal super app blurred that focus and left users, advertisers, and regulators unsure what the platform was really for. This tension between “super app” and “super focus” is at the heart of new research by Michelle Vanassche, Steve Muylle, and Amit Basu. Should a platform support a broad scope of mechanisms and activities, or stay narrowly focused on a particular type? 
Digital platforms are businesses that act as intermediaries between different groups of users—like Uber, which connects drivers and riders—and they grow by leveraging cross-side network effects (more riders attract more drivers, and vice versa) and same-side network effects, where mechanisms such as ratings and reviews make the service more useful for other users on the same side of the market. Given their scale and reach, digital platforms have become an important business model in the global economy: many of the world’s most valuable firms (e.g., Apple, Amazon, Meta) are platform companies. Yet, despite their prominence, we know relatively little about what established platforms actually do in practice—specifically, which user activities they support and whether they concentrate on a single type of activity or spread their efforts across multiple types.
To address this gap, the authors examine more than 80 established platforms and map the activities they support, in order to understand how these platforms position themselves. Three broad activity types were found: 

• Processing transactions: These platforms connect sellers with buyers (e.g., eBay, Amazon Marketplace).
• Enabling engagement: These platforms enable potentially large numbers of people to communicate with each other and share common interests (e.g., Facebook, Reddit).
• Facilitating innovation: These platforms facilitate collaborative problem-solving and creativity and the “wisdom of crowds’ (e.g., Kaggle, InnoCentive).

Beyond distinguishing these three activity types, the analysis also reveals how established platforms structure their activity support. By studying the diverse sets of activities supported by platforms such as Facebook, Amazon Marketplace, Uber, Airbnb and many other prominent digital platforms, they find that platforms tend to organize their offerings, around a single, primary activity type. Configurations that combine two types are less common, and genuinely broad “super-app” configurations that support all three activity types are rather rare.
These findings debunk the super-app myth: even the biggest platforms with deep pockets don’t actually do everything at once. Take Amazon Marketplace—if any platform seems ready to become a super app, it’s Amazon Marketplace. Yet the platform has stayed stubbornly focused on transactions, pouring its resources into being the place to buy and sell, rather than trying to be everything for everyone. For platform owners and managers, that’s a sobering reality check: if even the giants are concentrating rather than trying to be everything for everyone, what makes you so sure your platform should chase super-app status?
At the same time, the results open up a new set of questions:
First, why do most platforms restrict their scope to a single activity type?
Is it because there are diseconomies of scope when trying to excel across transaction, engagement, and innovation activities at once? Are synergies between activity types weaker than we might expect? Or does mixing activity types risk confusing the market and prompting some participants to leave?
Second, why do some platforms choose to broaden their activity scope?
Do they hope to increase participation by offering multiple sources of value? Are they trying to diversify or grow revenues? Or are they leveraging secondary activities to reinforce participation and monetization in their primary activity type, or to tap into additional network effects?
Third, how should a platform think about changing its activity scope over time?
As a platform matures, which strategic moves make sense: doubling down on what it does best, or branching out into new activity types to unlock new growth?
Rather than prescribing a single “best” strategy, the study outlines the activity types and scope decisions that platforms face. Follow-up studies will examine these questions: why some platforms stay narrowly scoped, why others broaden, and how changes in activity scope over time affect participation, monetization, and long-term performance.

Michelle Vanassche (Fellow) is a Doctoral Researcher at Vlerick Business School in Belgium. She focuses on the structure and evolution of digital businesses such as Google, Apple’s iPhone, Facebook and Uber.
Amit Basu (Senior Fellow) is the Carr P. Collins Chair of Management Information Sciences at the Edwin L. Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Chairman of the Information Technology and Operations Management department at the school. His research interests are in the areas of digital strategy, electronic commerce, knowledge and data base systems, decision support systems and workflow management.
Steve Muylle is a Professor, Partner and Associate Dean Digital Learning at Vlerick Business School. He focuses on technologies including artificial intelligence and machine learning, augmented, mixed and virtual reality, big data, blockchain, cloud, Internet of Things, mobile, social media and web. His work has been published in leading scientific outlets, and he has received many academic awards.
 
The post Super App or Super Focus? How Digital Platforms Position Themselves for Sustainable Growth appeared first on Portulans Institute.