The Ayoba Obituary : Africa did not reject super apps. It rejected the wrong version of them.
Africa did not reject super apps. It rejected the wrong version of them
The Ayoba Obituary : Africa did not reject super apps. It rejected the wrong version of them.
That, to me, is the clearest way to read what has happened over the past few years. The continent was never likely to produce one neat WeChat-for-Africa, sweeping across markets with one interface, one model and one rhythm of adoption. That benchmark was always too lazy for a region this fragmented, this uneven in digital adoption, and this differently regulated from one market to the next. What is emerging instead is narrower, but more durable. The African super-app dream has narrowed, not died. But the market has already voted against the broad lifestyle version of that idea. What is working is not the app that tries to do everything. It is the platform that becomes the default channel for everyday money and then layers services outward from there.
The cleanest place to begin is MTN’s Ayoba. For a while, Ayoba looked like one of the boldest homegrown attempts to build an African super app at scale. MTN said it had reached 35 million monthly active users by December 2023. Yet in March 2026, Ayoba began disappearing from app stores as MTN moved to wind it down in selected markets, telling users that from March 20, 2026 the app would no longer be available for download. That matters, not because every shutdown is profound, but because Ayoba had the ingredients that people often mistake for inevitability: a major telco parent, distribution, brand recognition, content, and years of push behind it. Its decline did not kill the super-app story in Africa. It killed the illusion that distribution alone is enough.
What makes that lesson sharper is what happened right beside Ayoba inside the same group. In MTN’s 2025 results, the company reported 69.5 million monthly active Mobile Money customers, 23.3 billion fintech transactions and $500.3 billion in fintech transaction value. It also said it invested R38 billion in networks and platforms in 2025. In other words, the part of MTN’s digital strategy tied most closely to money movement, recurring utility and the pipes underneath them kept compounding, even as the broader “super app” wrapper lost momentum. That is not a side note. That is where the market gave its answer. Africa did not say it had no appetite for digital ecosystems. It said the ecosystem has to be anchored in something more indispensable than reach. (MTN Group)
That is why I think the super-app conversation on Africa has often been framed from the wrong end. Too much of it has focused on interface and not enough on habit; on breadth and not enough on economic centrality. The question was never just whether a company could bundle enough services into one app. The harder question was whether it could secure a place in everyday money flow so consistently that adding more services would feel like a natural extension of behaviour people already had. That is a higher bar, but it is also a more useful one, because it explains why some platforms are deepening and others are merely visible.
The mobile money data makes that point impossible to ignore. GSMA says mobile money processed over $2 trillion globally in 2025, while merchant payments rose to $155 billion, the fastest-growing mobile money use case. This is not just a story about peer-to-peer transfers anymore. It is a story about platforms moving closer to the commercial centre of daily life: collections, merchant payments, settlement, disbursements and the widening flow of routine transactions. Africa is not rewarding digital malls. It is rewarding platforms that sit closest to daily cashflow. (GSMA)
And this is where the Africa-wide strategic question becomes much more interesting. The harder problem here was never simply building the app. It was building a model that could travel. Africa is not one market. It is a patchwork of regulators, currencies, switching systems, merchant realities, device economics and very different consumer habits. GSMA estimates that the mobile sector contributed $220 billion, or 7.7% of GDP, to Africa in 2024, and it is still pushing a $40 smartphone initiative because affordability remains central to widening access.
At the same time, AfricaNenda says that between July 2024 and June 2025, five new domestic instant payment systems went live on the continent, taking the total to 33 domestic systems across 25 countries. So yes, the rails are widening. Yes, the addressable market is growing. But the operating environment remains fragmented enough that only some models will survive the jump from one market to many.
The real advantage, then, does not lie with the app that launches the most features. It lies with the platform that can standardise a strong core, localise intelligently at the edges, and scale without losing economic logic, regulatory permission or user habit.
That is also why the WeChat comparison has always been more distracting than helpful. Tencent says Weixin and WeChat had more than 1.3 billion monthly active users as of March 2024. But that scale emerged inside a huge, relatively integrated home market. Africa was never going to reward feature sprawl in quite the same way. The continent is too fragmented, too differently regulated, and too uneven in device access and payment architecture for one broad lifestyle app simply to sweep across it. What was always more likely was a different kind of outcome: not one continental super app, but a set of regional, regulated, payments-first ecosystems, each building from a hard core of utility outward.
On that basis, Orange is still the closest thing Africa has to a true multi-country super-app play. When it launched Max it in late 2023, Orange said it was targeting around 45 million active users by 2025. The reality has been more disciplined and, frankly, more instructive. Orange’s 2024–2025 integrated annual report says Max it has been downloaded more than 43 million times and has 18 million active users. Later Orange communications put the number at over 22 million active users across 15 countries. Those are meaningful numbers, but the more important ones sit underneath them.
Orange says it has 39.7 million active Orange Money customers, and in its Africa and Middle East business it points to more than 110 million Orange Money subscribers across 17 countries. That is what makes Orange the closest thing to a travelling model. Max it is not trying to invent digital habit from scratch. It is extending from connectivity and financial usage that already exist. (AppsAfrica)
Safaricom, by contrast, offers the cleanest proof of what happens when density, trust and money habit are already concentrated in one market. In its 2025 annual report, Safaricom said active M-PESA Super App users rose from 3.6 million to 4.7 million. Those are solid numbers. But even those numbers make the deeper point. In Kenya, the app layer is not the foundation. M-PESA is.
The super-app experience works because it is sitting on top of one of the deepest transaction habits on the continent. Safaricom is not really evidence that Africa wants an all-in-one app for its own sake. It is evidence that once a payment rail becomes part of everyday life, it becomes much easier to pull other services into the same habit loop.
PalmPay is the most interesting fintech-led challenger for the same reason. PalmPay says it has over 35 million registered users and processes up to 15 million transactions daily. That is not a content habit. That is a money habit. It is also what makes PalmPay more interesting than many louder consumer-internet stories. The company is building from transaction frequency outward, not from attention outward. The open question is whether a powerful payments habit in one or two core markets can become a repeatable regional model across Africa. But strategically, it is much closer to where the market is moving than the older attention-first logic ever was.
Jumia matters too, but for a different reason. Its 2025 results showed $188.9 million in revenue, up 13%, and $818.6 million in GMV, up 14%, with the company pointing to Q4 2026 breakeven. That is real progress, and more disciplined progress than many people give it credit for.
But Jumia is still proving whether a useful commerce ecosystem can become something closer to recurring infrastructure. The same broad question hangs over other regional players as well. Visibility is not the same thing as indispensability. Reach is not the same thing as habit. And usefulness, while important, is still not the same thing as becoming the platform people and businesses default to when value actually has to move.
The global parallels strengthen this reading rather than weaken it. In Southeast Asia, Grab reported its first full year of net profit in 2025, reached 50.5 million monthly transacting users, generated $22.1 billion in on-demand GMV and grew financial-services revenue to $347 million.
In Latin America, Mercado Pago ended 2025 with nearly 78 million monthly active users and $278 billion in total payment volume. Those companies did not become durable because they kept bolting random services onto an interface. They became durable because they built a hard commercial core, deepened transaction frequency, then expanded from that core into lending, commerce, delivery and other adjacencies. In that sense, Africa is not breaking the pattern. It is following it in its own form.
So the bottom line is this: the African super-app dream has narrowed, not died. The closest thing to success is not one mega continental app. It is a set of regional, regulated, payments-first ecosystems. Right now, I would say Orange is closest to a true multi-country super app. MTN has the biggest payments muscle. Safaricom has the cleanest single-market execution. PalmPay is the most interesting fintech-led challenger. Jumia, Yango and Gozem matter too, but they are still proving whether they can become habit-forming infrastructure rather than just useful platforms. The more important point, though, sits underneath all of them.
The deeper lesson is not really about apps at all. It is about what kind of model can actually travel across African markets. MTN’s Ayoba shutdown did not kill the super-app story in Africa. It killed the illusion that distribution alone is enough. The harder challenge was never simply building an interface with many services.
It was building a platform with a strong enough core utility to survive very different regulatory systems, payment architectures, consumer habits, merchant realities and cost structures across the continent.
That is why the real contest now is not about who can add the most features. It is about who can turn a domestic advantage into a repeatable regional system. Who can move from product to platform, from platform to ecosystem, and from ecosystem to something close to infrastructure in the daily lives of consumers and businesses? Africa did not fail at super apps. It repriced the idea around a tougher standard: not breadth for its own sake, but a model resilient enough to scale across fragmented markets. The winners will be the companies that understand that in Africa, scale is not just about user growth. It is about building something that can travel.