The Asian market right now is getting crowded by messaging apps and the popularity has been growing with increasing user adoption. The latest to celebrate user milestone is the Japanese free messaging app Line. According to Startup Dating, Line recently had passed 150 million downloads or users. The service that is one of the popular messaging apps and present in 12 languages across all mobile platforms has credited the growth to its global expansion to countries like Spain, Latin America and Africa.
The hockey stick growth has come as no surprise, since the app had registered the 150 million mark within 23 months of going public and of which more than 100 million downloads happened in the mid of January this year, as reported by The Next Web.
Line with 45 million users in its home market of Japan, has also been gaining market share in Korea, China and Southeast Asia. However, the success in overseas market not only hints at the growth potential of Line but other Asian messaging apps too. With its move to US, Line has invested heavily on advertising campaigns, which has subsequently resulted into more than 11 million downloads, says The Next Web.
However, Line is not gaining popularity only for its marketing strategies but for features that have been missing from popular apps like WhatsApp. Line is a messaging app which is more photo and video centric, and has also developed a model where you can play games along with your friends. In addition, to this the company makes a lot of money via its game series and in app-purchases which had hit 100 million downloads in the month of March.
The messaging app market which is already crowded with apps like Kakaotalk from Korea that had registered 86 million downloads globally. Then we have China’s giant WeChat which has more than 300 million users on its platform, and has shown considerable presence in the Indian continent. The app has been associating with Bollywood movie promotions and trying to get hold of the Indian youth that is stuck on WhatsApp. And finally there is WhatsApp that has been in the recent news from rumors floating that Google might acquire it and with 200 million active users the app is bigger than Twitter.
Clearly messaging apps are going to take over social media big time since the world is moving rapidly to smaller screens. Asia is going to see this move faster due to the proliferation of apps like Line.
Image courtesy: www.cubrid.org
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