Across Southeast Asia, mobile has become central to everyday life for hundreds of millions of users. Telecom operators built and sustain the infrastructure that makes all of this possible, a role that is as critical as any in the region’s digital economy. Yet as the mobile ecosystem has evolved, a significant new opportunity has emerged: the chance to extend that foundational role into daily digital engagement. Platforms purpose-built for habitual use have shown what is possible when apps are designed around daily routines. The question for operators is how to claim their share of that value, and the conditions to do so have never been more favourable.
Mobile users in Southeast Asia spend four to five hours a day on their phones. In the Philippines, that’s around 5 hours 21 minutes. In Indonesia, approximately 4 hours 38 minutes on mobile, and Vietnam consistently ranks among the region’s highest-usage markets. Telco apps capture almost none of it. Most operator apps are built for three tasks: check your balance, buy a top-up, and pay a bill. That’s fine as far as it goes. But it means the app gets opened, used for 90 seconds, and closed. It doesn’t compete for daily time and attention. It doesn’t need to. And that, for telcos operating in one of the world’s most mobile-intensive regions, is the structural problem.
The benchmark for what deep digital engagement looks like is WeChat. With over a billion active users, WeChat is the genuine article, a platform woven so thoroughly into daily life in China that it functions as an operating system for commerce, communication, payments, entertainment, and more. Users return multiple times a day. not because they need to complete a transaction, but because the platform has become infrastructure for life. That level of habitual engagement is the standard that operators can aspire to as they evolve their own digital platforms. Meanwhile, telcos apps in most markets have remained built around transactional interfaces, a design philosophy that served a different era but leaves meaningful daily engagement on the table.
It is worth being precise about what the opportunity actually is. Users in Southeast Asia do not expect their telco app to become a full superapp – and operators should not try to be one. The opportunity is narrower and more achievable: to build on the repeat behaviour that already exists. Subscribers are already opening their telco app regularly. The question is what happens once they are inside. By introducing services that feel relevant rewards, content, commerce, games, digital earning, operators can gradually extend the time subscribers spend within their ecosystem, without asking users to change their habits or download something new. Engagement becomes the pull factor that transforms a routine bill-pay into a daily digital destination.
The GSMA’s Mobile Economy 2026 report frames the cost of that inertia. In 2025, mobile technologies generated $7.6 trillion globally, 6.4 percent of GDP, with projections of $11.3 trillion by 2030. Data traffic is expected to more than triple over the same period, according to the Ericsson Mobility Report. Yet operator revenues are not keeping pace. In prepaid-dominant markets across Southeast Asia, where most users top up rather than subscribe, the gap between extremely high usage and actual monetisation has become especially pronounced.
Some operators are now trying to close that gap. Indonesia, with well over 150 million mobile subscribers and one of the world’s most engaged digital populations, shows both the scale of the opportunity and the challenge. Since July 2024, Telkomsel has been evolving its MyTelkomsel app into a super-app, expanding from basic connectivity management into entertainment, travel, and commerce, with 46 million users at launch and over 100 million Play Store installs to date. In Sri Lanka, Dialog Axiata has integrated TBH’s engagement infrastructure as MissionX within its flagship MyDialog app that has reached over 3 million users by integrating more rewarding and lifestyle-oriented features.
These are serious and strategic efforts to compete for daily relevance. They signal a broader recognition among forward-thinking operators that the next phase of growth lies not just in connectivity, but in deepening the relationship with the subscriber beyond the transaction.
The reason most telco apps struggle at this isn’t strategy, it’s architecture. These apps were engineered for transactions, and the infrastructure underneath them reflects that. There’s no native mechanism for rewarding engagement, personalising content, or building the kind of habit loop that brings users back unprompted. Mobile gaming faces a version of the same problem. Research shows that only about 1.83 percent of players ever spend money in-app. Passive products with no engagement layer have a very low revenue ceiling.
Having worked closely with operators across the region, I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly. The struggling apps almost always share the same design philosophy: open when you need something specific, close when you’re done. They weren’t built to become part of anyone’s daily life. That becomes a significant disadvantage when users have far more compelling alternatives just one tap away.
The encouraging part is that solving this doesn’t require discarding existing billing or account management systems. It involves adding a smart engagement layer on top, one that rewards real user behaviour, delivers personalised value, and integrates smoothly with the services people already use day to day. The goal is to give users a genuine reason to return, and critically, to make sure the app gives something back when they do. Most telco apps today are a one-way street; the user comes in, completes a task, and leaves with nothing beyond the transaction itself. Users who watch content, play a game, browse an offer, or simply stay a little longer earn real rewards, airtime, data, vouchers, and essentials. The relationship stops being purely extractive and becomes genuinely reciprocal. That shift in dynamic is what turns occasional utility into a daily habit.
Where operators have taken this approach seriously, the early results have been promising: higher daily active users, meaningfully longer session times, improved retention rates, and entirely new revenue streams. None of this should come as a surprise. When people find an app genuinely useful and rewarding, they simply use it more.
The raw material is already there. Hundreds of billions of hours of mobile attention are being spent across Southeast Asia every year. Telcos don’t need to create new demand. They need to meet users where they already are and provide something worth staying for. The technology and data required to do this exist today. What’s often missing is the strategic decision to treat customer engagement with the same seriousness and investment as network infrastructure and spectrum.
In the end, this isn’t just about protecting revenue. The GSMA identifies the mobile productivity layer as the driver of roughly 90 percent of future GDP growth in the region. Operators who successfully evolve from pure connectivity providers into platforms that deliver ongoing value will be far better positioned to capture that growth and play a more meaningful role in the region’s digital future.
Connectivity remains the essential foundation. But what operators choose to build on top of it will ultimately determine how relevant they remain in their customers’ daily digital lives.
Manit Parikh is Founder and CEO, The Binary Holdings.
I am the Founder & CEO of The Binary Holdings (TBH) — a Web3 infrastructure company scaling into the world’s largest Digital Nation. Today, TBH powers 200M+ users across 7+ telcos, banks, and fintechs, processing 950M+ monthly transactions on our proprietary BNRY Mainnet. We are on track to reach 1B wallets by December 2026, embedding TBH as national-scale digital infrastructure across Asia, MENA, and beyond.
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