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wow I moved to Japan in April 2011 and cannot believe that line was introduced in June 2011. It was nearly ubiquitous among people my age roughly 20-30 and I c

wow I moved to Japan in April 2011 and cannot believe that line was introduced in June 2011. It was nearly ubiquitous among people my age roughly 20-30 and I can't even remember not having it. I have never been into emoticons or emoji, but I am not ashamed to say I probably spent a few thousand Yen on stickers and would probably do it again. Stickers were a great way to converse with friends whose English was not strong. Things like sarcasm and a lot of American humor does not translate well and stickers were a great medium. I have moved on from Japan but I still use it all the time to keep up with friends back there. I think the user experience is stronger than whatsapp and facebook messenger.

Nux 12y ago
+1 better experience than Whatsapp, whether we like it or not, emoji do make sense, even though they'll probably never be as hugely used as in Japan.
- daveid 12y ago
  This might not be the right place but I'd like to mention that for me, Line works less reliably than Whatsapp on Android. Line fails to deliver any messages unless I explicitly open the app. Plus as an aside, do we have any information on how secure Line is?
  - bsder 12y ago
    Security is hard; let's sell stickers.
  - ffn 12y ago
    It might be unencrypted http for all the target audience cares about. 20-30s youngsters using it to bat emoticons back and forth and discussing the merits of frills versus lace is probably a lot more concerned with how cute the stickers are versus how likely an adversarial party would high-jack a session cookie. On the other hand, if the girls and boys using Line are using it to negotiate drug deals, secret assassination plans, or naked selfies, security might be more important.
deleted 12y ago
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