[hardwaresofton]

I think that works one way but not the other -- America has the blessing of being the source of lots of new apps and tech companies with global success/ambitions (i.e. Discord has some penetration for gamers anywhere), but Japan is less so.

AFAIK LINE has not had such success. I wouldn't be surprised if most people in the US did not know of LINE, unless they were avid readers of TechCrunch or something it just doesn't come up.

Would be interesting to know what % of people on HN know about LINE though

[saagarjha]

I’m pretty sure LINE has more than twice the users that Twitter has. Not knowing it is like not knowing about WeChat: it’s because you’re not familiar with things outside of the US, rather than not being up-to-date with the space in general.

[zild3d]

Never heard of LINE, but looks like they're around 85M monthly active users, twitter somewhere past 330M

https://www.statista.com/statistics/560545/number-of-monthly...

[fomine3]

The statistics only count users in Japan. It is also used on other asia countries.