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Comment by timoth3y | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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