[timoth3y]

Line was actually a Korean startup. There days, it's not a great app, but strong network effects keep it dominant here in Japan.

[Aeolun]

Line works fine for almost all actual use cases I have for it though.

[ne0flex]

Curious why you say it's not a great app?

[rwmj]

Really? I use Line all the time including for sending text, video, and making audio and video calls, and it works great. Never had issues with it.

[presentation]

I find it unreliable and feature poor compared to western messaging apps. Calls drop/lag/cut out all the time, notifications fail to get delivered, and so on

[pezezin]

I find it feature richer than Whatsapp and FB Messenger, but that is not saying much. I am still salty that Whatsapp is the most popular application back home in Europe...

Compared to Telegram, I find Telegram to be much faster and robust, and the multi-device synchronization works better. IMHO, it is Telegram's strongest selling point.

But there is one LINE's feature that I really like and I have not seen in other messaging apps: the ability to create albums with your friends, to organize your pictures properly instead of having an endless stream of disorganized pictures.

[shiroiushi]

The biggest problem I see with it, almost daily, is that I'm trying to type in a sticker, by typing some text that brings up relevant stickers, and it just doesn't work. Usually, I can type in something like "happy" and a bunch of stickers will pop up that are relevant to that keyword, and I can select one and send it. But sometimes (it seems once a day lately), it gets into some state where it just never brings up the stickers at all, no matter how long I wait. So I have to kill the app and restart it, and it works again.

I almost never use it for voice calls these days, so I haven't seen issues there. But the sticker thing happens to me frequently, and it's not a good sign I think. I'm guessing the app has gotten too bloated and now weird bugs like this are showing up.

[hnlmorg]

This Line? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details/%EB%9D%BC%EC%9D%B...

From the reviews, it looks like the unhappy path wasn’t well tested.

[klausa]

FWIW, this is on par with reviews for _anything_ in Japan.

The fanciest and most recommended ramen shops don't crack 3.9 on local review sites, the mindset is completely different from "oh nothing went wrong, 5 stars I guess!".

[freddie_mercury]

Ha, I'm reminded of reviews from Vietnam where you'd usually see restaurants get destroyed in reviews because they are 20 cents more expensive than some place else. Price was such a much bigger part of the review than other places I've lived.

[hnlmorg]

I wasn’t looking at the stars. I was looking at all the reviews from different people saying the app locked them out of all their contacts.

[rwmj]

Yes that one. It works very effectively for me and I've not had any dropped calls, except for the obvious where we one of us loses network connectivity.