The super app graveyard: ‘Everything apps’ just don’t work in Africa

This month, MTN began shutting down Ayoba while Moniepoint acquired restaurant startup Orda, two developments tied to the same ambition of building Africa’s ‘everything app’.

OPay tried it first, flooding the streets of Lagos with green ORide helmets and OFood delivery bags before a regulatory hammer and the economics of logistics forced a retreat to pure fintech. Jumia tried it, bundling everything from travel bookings to food delivery, only to spend the last two years amputating those same limbs to save the torso.

MTN’s Ayoba, despite having the massive distribution of a continental carrier and the promise of data-free usage, couldn’t sustain the super app dream. By the time it announced its shutdown on March 20, 2026, it had become a cautionary tale of an app that did a dozen things adequately while its users only wanted one thing done perfectly.

Moniepoint’s bet with Orda is that while consumer super apps have failed, merchant super apps might survive. By owning the kitchen workflow, the inventory, and the payment rail, they are making themselves un-deletable for a restaurant owner.

The deal, which will see Orda rebranded as Moniebook for Restaurants, looks like the final piece of the “full-stack” puzzle for the food industry. But coming just three days after MTN Group began sunsetting its ambitious super app, the industry is forced to confront a haunting reality: Africa is becoming a graveyard for companies that tried to do everything.

The killers of African super apps

Why do the super apps fail? The answer may lie in the users’ pockets. The average smartphone in Nigeria or Kenya is a mid-range device with limited RAM and a constant “Storage Full” notification. A new 150MB super app that integrates messaging, payments, and restaurant management is the first thing to be deleted when it’s time to take a new photo. In contrast, lean, single-purpose apps like PalmPay or a stripped-back OPay are sticky precisely because they are lightweight and reliable.

Furthermore, the African consumer is not a loyal one in the traditional sense; they are a value consumer. While Moniepoint is the dominant choice for merchant/POS operations, OPay remains the leader for P2P (personal) transfers because of its high-speed internal ledger. Nigerians will use Moniepoint for their POS, OPay for their personal transfers, and WhatsApp to talk to their customers. When a company tries to be your bank, your accountant, and your restaurant manager, and then something breaks, the user loses trust in the entire ecosystem.

Finally, WhatsApp is Africa’s internet, where a lot of personal and business communications already happen. Users may be reluctant to move their social circles to a new app just to pay a bill or order food, especially when they can just message a vendor on WhatsApp anyway.

The M-Pesa illusion

While many have filled the super app graveyard, one system appears to have largely escaped it. M-Pesa, launched in 2007 by Safaricom, began as a simple way for Kenyans to send money via SMS without a bank account. Today, it serves over 40 million users, powering everything from tax payments to stock investments.

But its evolution followed a different path. Instead of baking services directly into a bloated app, M-Pesa relies on WebViews and Daraja APIs, features that load on demand, from the cloud, rather than sitting permanently on the user’s device. By decoupling the payment rail from lifestyle features, M-Pesa ensures that even when other services glitch, the ‘Transfer’ button keeps running.

Apps like MTN’s Ayoba were built as monoliths, where messaging, music, news, and payments are all baked into a single, massive codebase. Fixing a bug in one feature can require a 100MB+ update for the entire app. In a data-sensitive market like Nigeria, that’s a delete-on-sight offense.

Moniepoint’s acquisition of Orda suggests a shift toward an operating system model. Instead of asking consumers to download a super app, it is embedding Orda’s inventory management directly into the merchant’s POS terminal, moving the technical burden from the consumer’s phone to the merchant’s infrastructure.

But this strategy comes with a clear risk. If the core payment rail—the POS—remains unreliable while Moniepoint builds out Moniebook for Restaurants, merchants may move their money elsewhere before the vision is fully realised. The warning signs are already visible. On March 22, 2026, Moniepoint’s processing arm, Monnify, returned service errors, a reminder that the system is still fragile. And this is not unique to Moniepoint. From PalmPay’s rural connectivity struggles to persistent USSD delays in Nigeria, the constraint is the same.

Even with its massive scale and a $300 million Fintech 2.0 upgrade, M-Pesa remains a reminder that absolute reliability is a myth in African fintech. Just as Moniepoint’s Monnify faced service errors on March 22, 2026, M-Pesa was hit by a major transaction delay on March 21, 2026, that left users in a state of “phantom debits”. Money was deducted from wallets but never reached recipients.

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) recently warned that M-Pesa is so deeply embedded in the national economy that its periodic downtimes now “significantly impair the real economy”. M-Pesa proves that even the most advanced cloud-native architecture can still be brought to its knees by the sheer friction of 6,000 transactions per second (TPS).

Orda’s acquisition cannot be justified as a hunt for data to improve loan services. Moniepoint’s 99.8% repayment rate on ₦1 trillion in automated loans proves their algorithm already sees enough to win. By buying Orda, Moniepoint isn’t looking to see more; they are looking to own more. But scale introduces its own risk.

The lesson is simple: before you try to own the world, make sure your ‘transfer’ button never fails. In Africa’s tech landscape, the greatest innovation may just be reliability.

Last updated: March 24, 2026