One municipal app and login placed in front of every city service, usually built to replace an estate of one-app-per-department.
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A government super-app is a single mobile front door to everything a city administration does: one login, one identity check, and behind it permits, taxes, health appointments, transport, reporting and emergency numbers. The idea is borrowed from consumer messaging apps, and the municipal version is usually a repair job rather than a greenfield ambition.
That is the part worth knowing. Bandung spent an era launching a separate app per service and now runs one consolidated portal instead; its communications department says the city is no longer competing to build more apps. Nanjing's app has absorbed the output of more than 80 departments into some 290 service scenarios, and Shanghai's covers over 3,150 service items.
Read the numbers carefully. Cities report cumulative registrations, the only figure that never falls: Nanjing's 11.25 million registered users exceed its 9.58 million residents, which is neither fraud nor adoption. The question that matters — how many of those services anyone opened last month — is almost never published. A city app's last-updated date in the app store is the cheapest honesty check available.
Added 2026-08-20 · Part of the growing Smart City Glossary