Spotify adopted the Chinese super-app model to combat declining app store installs
Gustav Söderström · Spotify’s Journey To Profitability · Invest Like The Best · May 20, 2025 · at 28:57
Gustav Söderström, CPTO of Spotify, explains why Spotify consolidated music, podcasts, and audiobooks into one application rather than unbundling.
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“Our entire strategy is basically, we decided this many years ago before it was popular, but you saw the Chinese app, the Chinese starting to build super apps, whereas the Western world built one app per use case. We kind of adopted the Chinese super app idea and said, The hardest thing is going to be to get installs. You can see the average number of installs from the app store dropping like below one on average. So distribution became the most important thing. And then we chose, you know, when we did podcasts and later books and videos, we're going to build it in the same application because then we can leverage our own distribution.”
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