People from different cultures read emotions from facial cues distinctively. So far, social messaging apps have focused on Asian tastes and expressions, which could hurt their businesses abroad. That’s not to say Western users won’t use stickers-just that if they do, saving time won’t likely be why they value them. If you’re living in a place where the written language allows you to type “gotta cold” faster than it takes to locate your sneezing bear sticker, it’s hard to see the value of Line’s offerings. This brings us back to Line’s potential to expand its booming sticker business beyond Asia. frustration) or even specific situations, like coming down with a cold. It’s also much faster to use a sticker to convey complex emotions (e.g. (Characters are particularly cumbersome given how many homonyms there are.)Īnecdotally, this is a big reason why recorded voice memos are so appealing to Chinese and Japanese users. It can sometimes take a while to find the right Chinese characters on a phone, or to switch among the different scripts of Japanese. Even with predictive text, typing out Asian scripts on smartphones designed for the Latin alphabet can be more tedious than just punching in letters. Features include chatting via instant video, recording short voice messages stored as memos (it’s faster than typing, and more personal) and sending stickers.īut there’s also a more mechanical reason for the popularity of emojis and stickers in Asia. Line, KakaoTalk and WeChat have more bells and whistles than WhatsApp, which limits users to sending text and emoji (it doesn’t offer its own stickers). These souped-up apps draw on elements from Facebook, Instagram and gChat and let users send and exchange a much wider range of content to a much broader audience. Some 90% of smartphone users in Mexico, Italy and India have downloaded WhatsApp (for a total of 350 million active users), which allows its users to send text messages to each other via a Wi-Fi connection, instead of racking up charges on their phone bill. What’s a social messaging app?įor Westerners, a more familiar company than Line, WeChat or KakaoTalk is WhatsApp, an American company with a global presence. The Korean-owned, Japan-based app is betting a big part of its business that mobile phone users who are, say, fans of Barcelona’s soccer team will one day want a bobble-headed Lionel Messi dashing across their screen. That’s of particular importance to Line, which is rumored to be mulling an IPO in the US.

Kakaotalk emoticons