The failure mode of e-government is well known: a portal gets built, a press release goes out, and adoption never gets past the people who had no other choice. The projects below are interesting less for their technology than for the reasons people actually kept using them.
Dubai's DubaiNow app bundles 130+ government and private services into a single app, with 180 more due by 2027; its companion Paperless Strategy has removed over 336 million paper documents since 2021, saving an estimated 14 million work hours. The lesson generalises: e-government adoption tends to track how many separate logins and apps a resident can retire, not how advanced any single service is. Singapore's Smart Nation platform makes the same bet at a national level — digital identity, sensor data and AI services treated as one connected system rather than department-by-department portals.
Across all three: the services that got used bundled many small frustrations into one login, or paid for themselves through an incentive both sides felt (fewer paper hours, faster processing) — not through mandate alone. See the Governance category for the wider set of civic and administrative innovations these sit alongside.
Four municipal super-apps, each replacing an estate of one-app-per-service. Every one of them reports cumulative registrations, the only figure that never falls; none reports how many of its services anyone opened last month.
| Project | Since | Status | Outcome | Evidence | Run by | Cost | What the city reports |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| My Nanjing City Super-AppNanjing, 🇨🇳 | 2014 | Live | Ongoing | Official | City government | not public | More registered users than the city has residents — a decade of cumulative sign-ups, which is neither fraud nor adoption. |
| Suishenban: One Network for All Government ServicesShanghai, 🇨🇳 | 2018 | Live | Ongoing | Official | City government | not public | Thousands of service items and tens of millions of registrations, all self-reported by the municipality and not independently audited. |
| Sadayana — Bandung's Service Consolidation AppBandung, 🇮🇩 | — | Live | Ongoing | Official | City government | not public | The clean before-and-after: the city stopped competing to launch more apps and consolidated them behind one login. |
| TAMM: Abu Dhabi's Government Super-AppAbu Dhabi, 🇦🇪 | 2018 | Live | Ongoing | Official | Regional government | not public | One front door carrying services from public and private partners alike, which makes the estate it replaced harder to see. |