Yeah, I was familiar with LINE and Kakao, and I like how similar the setup is for SK and Japan.
Thanks to your point, this way we can easily see that despite SK being android-dominant and Japan being iPhone-dominant, both are not heavily into iMessage and prefer their native super apps instead.
Which provides a solid data point in favor of those claiming that the iMessage proliferation and dominance don’t necessarily have a direct causation stemming from iOS/Android dominance in a given market.
Interestingly enough in Korea, the iOS market share is fairly high among some demographics, especially young professionals with enough disposable income. Android (Samsung, at this point) phones are seen as an option for boomers or younger kids.
So in practice my wife uses FaceTime quite a bit with her siblings, and falls back to KakaoTalk when needed. Her iMessage usage isn't zero either, but mostly 1:1, group chats happen over KakaoTalk, since you know everyone will be there.
I don't know if similar patterns are seen in Japan.
Yeah, I suspect there is indeed something special about Kakao compared to LINE as well.
Out of my friends who moved to Japan, pretty much not a single one of them uses LINE aside from rare one-offs. But with Kakao? Hell, everyone I know who even traveled to SK uses Kakao on regular (not even talking about those who moved there) pretty much as the main app in general for so many different things.
EDIT: oh wow, this sent me down a pretty interesting rabbithole. Apparently 85% of people under 30 in SK had an Android as their first phone, with 53% of those people having switched to iOS since then[0].
