The most valuable real estate in the world is not in Hong Kong, Manhattan, Knightsbridge or Monaco. It’s in your pocket.
Your smartphone’s home screen has space for about 30 apps, depending on the display size. There are more than two million apps in Apple’s App Store and nearly 3.5 million on Google Play vying for those slots. The prize for landing one is huge: according to App Annie, a market data company, consumers spent $143bn on apps last year, consuming trillions of hours of screen time.
No wonder, then, that tech companies are racing to turn themselves into “super apps” — one-stop shops for a range of services, designed to entrench their app in your life.