Swiggy eyes multi-app strategy with rollout of 3 standalone apps

On-demand food and grocery delivery player Swiggy rolled out three new standalone smartphone apps this week. The company is starting the year by testing an interesting strategy of introducing separate apps while maintaining a single unified app for all services.

The firm will soon launch a separate app for its grocery delivery service Instamart, it said in a statement on Thursday. Earlier this week, it rolled out Pyng–a professional services marketplace—and a 15-minute food delivery app called Snacc in select pin codes of Bengaluru.

However, Instamart will continue to be available on the main Swiggy app as well. “Swiggy Instamart is on a rapid growth trajectory, offering a compelling value proposition with 10-minute deliveries and an expanding range of nearly 50,000 products. The launch of the Instamart app ensures seamless adoption and access to the service in a category that we believe we have only scratched the surface of,” Amitesh Jha, CEO of Swiggy Instamart, said.

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“Whether consumers access Instamart via Swiggy or the standalone app, all Swiggy One, One Lite, and One BLCK benefits will apply, ensuring that our ever-growing user base continues to enjoy the same great perks,” he added.

Listed rivals Swiggy and Zomato have followed different app strategies. While Zomato has introduced separate apps for different use cases like food delivery, Blinkit (quick commerce), and District (events and dining), Swiggy said it has benefitted from cross-pollination within a unified app.

Navigating single vs multiple app strategies

“Swiggy’s unified app strategy is successful because those who were frequent food delivery users latched on to Instamart quickly. It may not be a bad idea to hive off Instamart to a separate app because they now have a large user base,” said an early-stage venture capital investor who did not want to be named. The idea is to give customers what they want, this person added.

Swiggy has been optimistic about its single-app strategy. According to its red herring prospectus, Swiggy said that globally, successful hyperlocal commerce platforms have started with a high-frequency and sticky category, such as food delivery, as their foundational use case, which is crucial to acquiring consumers and building a steady flow of direct traffic on the unified app.

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“This then further allows the launch of other offerings such as fintech, mobility and travel, among others, that maintain stickiness across consumers and merchants and add other high-value, high-margin offerings to complement the high-frequency offerings,” the document added.

To this end, Swiggy has tried this before. Supr Daily, the subscription-led milk and grocery delivery service which it acquired in 2018, was maintained as a separate app. It was rebranded to InsanelyGood, a marketplace for premium groceries. After it gained momentum, the service was integrated into Swiggy’s main app.

Dineout, the table booking platform acquired by Swiggy in 2022, also continues to be a separate app, although a separate tab on the main app may have helped it gain traction.

Sriharsha Majety, managing director and group CEO of Swiggy, added, “While it’s been clear for a while now that Swiggy Instamart is set to match food delivery in size, recent developments show it’s on track to surpass food delivery in both penetration and scale. The positive reception in new cities and categories suggests Instamart could achieve far greater user adoption, going well beyond 100M+ users. Instamart will remain a key offering within the Swiggy app, helping us amass the cross-pollination benefits of a unified app.”

The executive noted that the standalone app will be an add-on meant to augment the firm’s reach by meeting consumers where they are.

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“We don’t want to be rigid about anything. Today it [single unified app] is serving us a distinct advantage with some cross-pollination benefits. We’re able to serve consumers a horizontal membership programme and they seem to like it. But we have to keep making sure that we are going where the puck is going. So, at this point, we’re saying that this is the strategy and we want to execute this violently. But at the same time, if there are any openings or blind spots in the strategy, we will act on them,” Majety told Mint in an interview shortly before going public in October 2024.