A Japanese Social App Contacts New Shores | Hacker News Reader

A Japanese Social App Contacts New Shores

nytimes.com

38 pointscalbear8131 comments

When we have gotten ourselves in an economy that encourage smart people to dedicate weeks to think about how to get people to buy as many silly virtual stickers and virtual packages of gold as possible to progress in games designed to get uncritical people to get hooked, it feels like it's time to get out, move to some remote place and start hacking on something that is actually important.

Nobody is stopping you. There is the door. Add to your list commenting on articles about said technologies on a site for nerds.

You are quite right.

I don't mind if really smart people decide to spend their time building cute chat apps and games. I think that, if a virtual sticker makes someone smile, it's earned its 170 yen.

For me, it's the smart people that are building surveillance systems and killer drones that are wasting their lives.

While I mostly agree - that surveillance drone technology could and will probably be used over again for beneficent purposes as well.

Living in Japan, I have to deal with Line but I don't like it. My major complaint is that Line encourages you to spam your friends advertising their games. For example, Line Pop artifically limits the number of times you can play the game, but you can easily nag your friends to send you more 'hearts' so you can continue. Pretty sure Line Play gives you in game currency for inviting anyone to play it, whether they are your friends or not, so I have tons of people I don't know send me requests. This stuff was so spammy I had turn off Line notifications, so I prefer to use normal text messages whenever possible. I could see other users get sick of it the same way I did.

And sadly that's probably the real reason for Line's success.

Interesting, I live in Japan too and use Line often, but have never received any requests of this sort. Sounds really annoying, but luckily it seems that no one I know actually plays those games.

That's actually not really unique features for Line games. Many of puzzle games in social network enforces play count that recovers over time. Some way, I find a lot of FB games worse in this respect that a lot of games practically make spamming to play mandatory. (or you could pay yourself out of The requirement however...)

East Asian or "Big in Japan" software rarely ports to the United States because the software flourishes under corporate nepotism. While installed on 72% of Japanese iPhones, Line's Android app is vastly more popular, mostly because it comes preinstalled on so many devices.

Not that coercive software installs are limited to Android. Baidu, Tencent and AliBaba live and die by shipping their own stores on iOS[0], where according to old estimates nearly 1/3 of iOS devices in China are jailbroken by carriers.

By these standards, Minesweeper is an enormously popular game. But we all understand its success as a creative product is owed largely to shipping with Windows.

Software in East Asia would export better if it grew in a more meritocratic environment. Say what you will about the top charts of iOS and how they got there, but the teams behind the top charts deliver great stuff in short time better than their competitors. No corruption.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/business/global/baidu-deal...

You mean that US and european android phone makers don't cut deals with app makers to preinstall their fabulous app on the user devices ?

Edit: cut out unneeded part

> Software in East Asia would export better if it grew in a more meritocratic environment.

That sounds about as antiquated as "Asians can't innovate, they just copy". I actually heard that line out of an American kid who had just arrived in Asia. He was, needless to say, a complete idiot.

The penetration rate of Line in Thailand is very high. My friends and I were early adopters and saw it grow organically, mostly because of the stickers included in the app (they're funny).

Having used Line daily for one -- probably closer to two -- years I can say it's a well made app. You don't need a conspiracy theory or to insult Japanese culture to account for its success.

Which is why Line could really make it that big. Line competed and won against Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, Skype, etc for iOS and Android in many Asian countries (not just Japan and Korea).

* It's a good product -- people like using it, and they keep using it.

* They know mobile marketing very well -- it's common to see Line and affiliated apps dominating the charts in the appstore.

* They know how to be international -- they've successfully marketed across multiple cultures.

* They are very innovative -- they constantly try out new business models and release multiple features.

It's no wonder that so many companies are copying them -- Facebook, Path, Wechat. It's a company that's worth paying attention to.

(edited for format)

I went on a trip to Japan in May, and line came back with me. It's got excellent group chat support for a mobile chat app, good quality voice calling, and is a really 'solid' feeling app. If you're going on a vacation with a bunch of friends I can't think of a better app to keep everyone in touch while you're on your adventure.

Seriously, for all that some people might dislike the silly/cute games/stickers/addons/yadayada, the basic LINE app is very good, vastly better than most of the other free voice/talk apps I've tried: much better voice quality and far less buggy than skype, much better quality and less buggy than kakaotalk, etc, and there's no point in even comparing to garbage like vibber or whatsapp.

Moreover, because it's so popular, as soon as I ran it for the first time, a bunch of people I knew just popped up automatically in my contact list (presumably matched with numbers in my phone's address book)...

I'm fairly new to Line, but with anime/manga lovers bias aside, I find those stamps feature very useful. It's not necessary the way to augment conversations but it helps to respond to subject that I don't have insight or prefer not to respond in details; I think it lowers a bar on burden to prevent awkward silence.

As for the software, my 91 years old grandfather in Japan just got iPhone as his first smartphone ever. He also signed up to Line as well so he can communicate with rest of relatives (including myself) who happened to be three different all over the US. I am impressed that he is learning it quick. I think the part of it is the fact it's not as intimidating as other solutions.

Although twitter has been getting more and more closed it'll take them a long time before they're as closed as Line. The word that best sums up Line and the company behind them is 'opaque'. My kids both had Line installed on their phones. When we got a Nexus 7 tablet they naturally wanted to do Line there as well. Bad idea. Line doesn't allow the same account on two devices. Line's solution? Instant deletion of the account. They lost a year of accumulated stickers and chats. The positive thing from my point of view is that they were completely discouraged and they no longer waste time on it.

It's super popular all over south-east asia. One of the reasons are the cute and fun "stickers" that can convey 80% of your daily emotions and situations. Stuck in overcrowded subway? there's a sticker for that.

> "can convey 80% of your daily emotions"

how do you navigate through the stickers?

They're sorted into packs or sets, each set with 24-40 stickers. You swipe between packs, and then between pages of 8 stickers. It's quite fast in practice, and you get used to what emotions can be expressed in each set. They also structure the sticker pages so that happy is towards the beginning, sad midway through, etc.

WeChat is also super popular in SEA. So we have Line from Japan, WeChat from China, KakaoTalk from Korea as the leading contenders in Asia. You see TV commercials of the apps endorsed by celebrities. They are evolving from simple chat app to a full social platform with own apps and games. You can say they compete with Facebook. I overheard a teen asking his friend why he is still using Facebook. Social apps to the teens might not be utility, more like clubs. And they want to be associated with cool clubs of the day.

You can add Whatsapp to that list, in Hong Kong at least. It's the dominant messaging app here and the company claims 50% penetration, although it's not clear by what measure.

WeChat and Line are definitely growing though. Not sure about elsewhere, but they've both been marketing pretty aggressively of late with TV and print commercials, billboards, store promotions etc.

I'm not sure why the private messaging apps in the US died off (MSN messenger, AIM, ICQ, etc).

Was it because something like Facebook and Twitter appeared? I know in China, without facebook, they continue to use private messaging apps like QQ and WeChat. But it seems the trend might be in all of Asia, even in places where facebook exists.

In the US, I'd have to guess it started with the T-Mobile Sidekick then continued with smartphones. Texting eventually became replaceable with messenger apps.

But that can't be it either. Texting is prevalent in China as well.

I'd say it is definitely because of sites like Facebook. Why bother getting peoples screen names for AIM when they're already on your Facebook contacts list?

Japan and Korea have Facebook and twitter (though I'm unaware of the penetration) yet they clearly still use apps like LINE.

Just a data point - line has been dominating the free category in the Japanese app store for about the past 6 months now they've expanded their base to include games.

> purchasing emoji stickers

> people over-sharing mundane details of their lives

> games with for-pay DLC

> "Don't worry, we won't sell your personal information or share your private conversations with the government. We promise." <- bullshit

Sounds awful. Thank you NYTimes for un-selling me so efficiently.

Reminds me to play zookeeper! Haven't launched that app in like 6-7 mo... Just turn off that music; line cannot compose for crap.

It seems you cannot install Line without divulging your whole iPhone contact list.

Skipping this.

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