It’s called a super app, unifying messaging, payments, digital identity, and public services.
In the US and Europe, Meta’s efforts to transform WhatsApp have failed to gain traction. It’s a similar story for X and Uber. But super apps dominate in China, and Russia now is rolling out its copycat effort Max.
It is more than technological innovation; it’s a calculated extension of state surveillance under the guise of “digital sovereignty.” Since September 1, 2025, Russian law has required Max to be preinstalled on all mobile devices sold domestically, embedding surveillance infrastructure into citizens’ daily digital lives.
The success or failure of super apps says much about a society. In the US, WhatsApp and other messaging apps — all private offerings — have yet to integrate payments and other services at scale, perhaps driven by privacy concerns about sharing too much data with one provider. Users prefer specialized apps for functions like finance.
In China and Russia, few such concerns exist. The Chinese WeChat has become foundational to both public and private life. Over the past decade, WeChat has transformed from a messaging platform into a ubiquitous surveillance tool, integrating policing, citizen verification, and location tracking in seamless, everyday use.
Public acceptance of this trade-off is widespread: many citizens willingly surrender certain freedoms for convenience, efficiency, and economic growth. Mechanisms such as mandatory real-name registration entrench this model, and the narrative of prosperity helps reinforce the government’s legitimacy.
In Russia, by contrast, no evident social compact equates technological control with prosperity. Public opinion toward democratic and economic reforms remains deeply ambivalent. A Pew Research Center survey found that only 43% of Russians retrospectively approved of the transition to multiparty democracy after 1989, and just 38% supported the move to a market economy, levels significantly lower than in many other Eastern European countries.
Nostalgia persists: in 2021, 49% of Russians expressed a preference for the Soviet-era political system, compared to 16% for Western-style democracy, and 62% favored economic planning over market capitalism. These attitudes suggest that, unlike in China, the notion of trading personal freedom for stability and prosperity does not resonate in Russia.
This divergence in public attitudes has essential consequences for surveillance technologies. In China, platforms like WeChat operate under domestic surveillance laws that require the company to share data, including communications, contacts, and location information, with the government. Most users accept or tolerate this arrangement.
In Russia, surveillance infrastructure is equally sophisticated. Systems like SORM, the “sovereign internet” initiative, and the facial recognition network known as Safe City in Moscow provide the Kremlin with formidable monitoring capabilities. Yet in a society where democratic demand is weak and many citizens are accustomed to authoritarian rule, these measures may be perceived less as modernization and more as the continuation of state dominance.
The Russian case highlights a fundamental difference with China. In China, the normalization of surveillance is tied to a prosperity narrative that many citizens accept, while in Russia, prosperity has not been sustained, and the legitimacy of state control remains fragile. As one Carnegie Endowment study notes, Russia’s economic stagnation and declining real incomes have increasingly undermined popular support for the Kremlin’s legitimacy, even as control mechanisms intensify.
Max is not simply a digital service, but a test case in authoritarian governance through technology. It is a platform designed to insert surveillance into the core of Russian civic life, but it does so in a society without the implicit bargain of prosperity that underpins China’s acceptance of similar tools.
For the transatlantic community, this divergence is relevant. It underscores the need to develop and promote digital models that combine innovation with privacy, autonomy, and democratic values, offering citizens worldwide a compelling alternative to the authoritarian model of governance through super apps.
What price are citizens willing to pay for such convenience? Max not only lacks end-to-end encryption but is in fact designed to share metadata, calls, location, and activity with the authorities, opening the door to truly draconian surveillance. Dissenting voices already describe it as a “digital gulag,” a space where every message can be inspected. Max is also being promoted as a tool of social control: its use is encouraged in schools, in official communications, and by telecom operators who include it in their plans without charging for the data it consumes.
The critical question is whether Max can sustain user engagement once the initial phase of mandatory installation fades. The track record of earlier Russian alternatives is not encouraging: platforms like TamTam and Rutube never displaced their international counterparts nor gained sufficient appeal on their own.
By contrast, WeChat has been an unequivocal success in China, despite being equally transparent to government oversight. Any success that Max achieves will likely stem less from persuasion than from gradual imposition. It may become the default option simply because it is the easiest and most practical path, even as it offers no meaningful privacy and positions itself as a tool of total state control. The network effect becomes the lever by which the government channels citizens into an environment of surveillance and control — citizens who walk voluntarily into the camp, because it is where all of their friends already are.
Max benefits from every institutional advantage, from legislation to massive promotion. Yet its long-term viability will depend on whether it can deliver genuine utility (digital identity, frictionless payments, access to public services, etc.) without requiring citizens to surrender their privacy entirely to the state’s scrutiny. At that critical juncture lies the accurate measure of whether Max becomes a genuine super-app or remains, in what may well be a purely rhetorical distinction, a perfect instrument for digital supervision.
Enrique Dans is a non-resident senior fellow in the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a Professor of Innovation at IE University in Madrid.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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