Super Apps

2016: The year we start living our digital lives from inside souped-up messaging apps on our smartphones?

It's starting to look that way.

Many U.S. consumers have heard about how the Chinese use the wildly popular WeChat for everything: ordering food, shopping, booking vacations, checking credit card bills and, yes, even messaging.

Likewise, in Japan, the Line app is so popular, it introduced its own payment service as well as an Uber-like service for its users to use from within the app.

Tech firms in the U.S. are trying to quickly ramp up messaging features and services to match Asian rivals.