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It depends on country. In Czech Republic, what's popular is Messenger. In western Europe, WhatsApp is quite popular. In eastern Europe, people like Viber (and s
by runn1ng 8y ago
It depends on country. In Czech Republic, what's popular is Messenger. In western Europe, WhatsApp is quite popular. In eastern Europe, people like Viber (and some people Telegram).
I am living in SEAsia now, and here it also depends on country. In some countries, WhatsApp rules; but in others, Line (weird Japanese thing) is popular. In Vietnam, where I am now, Zalo is popular; it's basically Whatsapp-but-Vietnamese; people like it, because it has Vietnamese stickers.
Of course China has its own ecosystem.
One of the features that determine how a chat program is popular are stupid stuff like localized stickers, or how well is the whole UX localized to the given language. (And how much is the program blocked in the given country.)
- rswail 8y agoActually LINE is Korean, owned by Naver. Big in Thailand and some other Asian countries. The Asian chat apps are Wechat (owned by Tencent), Alichat (owned by Alibaba) and LINE (owned by Naver via a Japanese sub). They are all competing now to capture the market share, We/Ali are competing hard in China and for many Chinese users, Wechat is the internet. It has embedded apps and a payment network. Alibaba are coming from behind. WePay/AliPay/LINE Pay are their correlating payment networks. Whatsapp is not big at all in Asia, it also doesn't have the various support things that people want, like a) stickers and sticker markets (big money on sticker sales), b) "cute" characters and associated toys/cards/etc, c) a payment system that lets kids easily buy virtual stuff like stickers and then extends to support retail/transit etc. That "stupid stuff" is actually worth a fortune. Disclosure: Working with LINE on transit related applications.