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Comment by 001spartan | Hacker News Reader

I've heard of KakaoTalk before; it's one of the most popular messaging applications in South Korea. According to Wikipedia it's used by 93% of smartphone owners in South Korea [1]. Daum Kakao is the parent company, and looks to have their fingers in a lot of generic web services pies.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KakaoTalk

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In turn, KakaoTalk is extremely similar to LINE, an application developed by the Japanese subsidiary of Daum's rival Naver. LINE seems to dominate the Japanese messenging market almost as strongly as KKT dominates South Korea (it's probably not possible to be functional socially without a KKT account there).

I've lived in Korea, my experience was you gave out phone numbers when meeting new people, KakaoTalk automatically scans new contacts and adds them to your KakaoTalk contacts and all subsequent texting and photo sharing was through KakaoTalk.

I only texted one person regularly while I lived there, my boss; my boss had a KakaoTalk account but didn't use it (with me at least).

I still use it, it's a very good messaging application with some pretty well implemented features (and excellent custom emojis!).

KakaoTalk is very well realized and really fun to use; the privacy side leaves me queasy, though. KakaoTalk conversations are known to be under government surveillance, and the KCSC is a troublesome institution in general (cf. http://opennetkorea.org/en/wp/administrative-censorship).

Ever heard of NSA?

Currently living in Japan, and I haven't given my phone number out to anyone yet. It's all exchanging LINE info (mostly using the QR functionality, sometimes just the ID). Almost everyone has a Facebook, but I don't think the messaging component is widely used. Almost all messaging, and even most voice calls, go through LINE.

Which I always thought was strange, given LINE generally provided a better experience and Naver is stronger in South Korea than Daum, at least in the search provider/maps areas.

Well, KakaoTalk was first -- they launched in 2010, and NHN launched LINE to the Japanese public in mid-2011. I'm actually not sure when or in what capacity Naver tried to port it to the Korean market. It would have needed localization beyond just UI translation. I've only used LINE for business, but I imagine the stickers (large emoji) that are a big part of the user experience of both apps when used casually were initially tuned for Japanese emoji culture (which has a fairly rich, complex history, that is intertwined with various popular Japanese characters and memes). So I'm guessing there was a significant time gap.

When I was in Japan last fall locals were astounded to find that I (an American) didn't have a LINE account. I'd never even heard of it.

Saying KakaoTalk is the most popular app in SK is a huge understatement. It's like mode of communication there, seeing the number of hours people spend on their phones.

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