Line was actually a Korean startup. There days, it's not a great app, but strong network effects keep it dominant here in Japan.

Line works fine for almost all actual use cases I have for it though.

Curious why you say it's not a great app?

Really? I use Line all the time including for sending text, video, and making audio and video calls, and it works great. Never had issues with it.

I find it unreliable and feature poor compared to western messaging apps. Calls drop/lag/cut out all the time, notifications fail to get delivered, and so on

I find it feature richer than Whatsapp and FB Messenger, but that is not saying much. I am still salty that Whatsapp is the most popular application back home in Europe...

Compared to Telegram, I find Telegram to be much faster and robust, and the multi-device synchronization works better. IMHO, it is Telegram's strongest selling point.

But there is one LINE's feature that I really like and I have not seen in other messaging apps: the ability to create albums with your friends, to organize your pictures properly instead of having an endless stream of disorganized pictures.

The biggest problem I see with it, almost daily, is that I'm trying to type in a sticker, by typing some text that brings up relevant stickers, and it just doesn't work. Usually, I can type in something like "happy" and a bunch of stickers will pop up that are relevant to that keyword, and I can select one and send it. But sometimes (it seems once a day lately), it gets into some state where it just never brings up the stickers at all, no matter how long I wait. So I have to kill the app and restart it, and it works again.

I almost never use it for voice calls these days, so I haven't seen issues there. But the sticker thing happens to me frequently, and it's not a good sign I think. I'm guessing the app has gotten too bloated and now weird bugs like this are showing up.

This Line? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details/%EB%9D%BC%EC%9D%B...

From the reviews, it looks like the unhappy path wasn’t well tested.

FWIW, this is on par with reviews for _anything_ in Japan.

The fanciest and most recommended ramen shops don't crack 3.9 on local review sites, the mindset is completely different from "oh nothing went wrong, 5 stars I guess!".

Ha, I'm reminded of reviews from Vietnam where you'd usually see restaurants get destroyed in reviews because they are 20 cents more expensive than some place else. Price was such a much bigger part of the review than other places I've lived.

I wasn’t looking at the stars. I was looking at all the reviews from different people saying the app locked them out of all their contacts.

Yes that one. It works very effectively for me and I've not had any dropped calls, except for the obvious where we one of us loses network connectivity.

Interestingly, Line originally was developed by Naver which is a South Korean company, although it's gone through several changes of corporate control since.

It's jointly owned by Naver and Softbank. A few months ago, there was a public outcry in Korea when the Japanese government threatened to twist Naver's arm to give up its share of Line, and South Korea's inexplicably pro-Japanese government stayed mum. With both governments enjoying abysmal public support, I have no idea how it will eventually be settled.

I wonder why Koreans care: they don't use LINE anyway, AFAIK. They all use KakaoTalk.

Why wouldn't Koreans care? We're talking about 50% ownership of a messaging platform that's de facto standard in multiple Asian countries. Imagine the UK government trying to force Google to sell DeepMind.

>Why wouldn't Koreans care?

Because they don't use it.

>We're talking about 50% ownership of a messaging platform that's de facto standard in multiple Asian countries

Yeah, except Korea. If they think it's so great, why aren't they using it themselves? It seems hypocritical.

>Imagine the UK government trying to force Google to sell DeepMind.

Does Google or anyone in the US actually use DeepMind? If so, that's a poor analogy.

s.korea is pro japan.

=. better than china.

So s korea should favor the country that boycotts them for random hurt feelings?

Also used widely in Taiwan.

And Thailand, apparently.

It was also popular in Indonesia, but the userbase eventually moved to WhatsApp and Discord.

People who run "official accounts" on LINE in Indonesia eventually moved to Twitter (the Indonesia-specific "base"/"menfess" accounts/culture were originally from similar LINE accounts allowing users to send anonymous messages so it can be relayed to many users, as well as from K-pop roleplaying on Twitter) and Instagram (for news, after LINE Today, their news aggregator, closed), too.