Yes, it's very bad. And it's not organic. People in this very thread say that they have no choice but to use LINE. I don't know how exactly it rose to prominence in Asia, but for example in Russia people are now being forced to use the state-developed MAX. You only actually force a part of society - various state clerks, military, police, educational workers, schoolchildren, students - and they, together with their relatives, are numerous enough to leave no alternative for others by making it a de facto communication platform (while other messengers are incrementally blocked and require a VPN, which is a no go for the non-tech-savvy since regular VPNs are outlawed and blocked as well, and setting up alternatives like VLESS implies buying a VPS abroad - and the payment options are virtually all gone as well).

I believe this is the result of the current world leaders' agenda to close down and isolate countries and make as much chaos as possible by stirring local nationalism, setting up nations against nations, impeding international communication, perpetrating local atrocities while the rest of the world stands aside indifferent or doesn't even know the full extent of those, etc. And this scattered world will still be owned and milked by global entities, that's where the hypocrisy is.

If anyone's been living under the rock, I recommend that they check the news - too many rabbid talking heads are in a runaway warmongering mode now and have moved the Overton window enough to say in all seriousness that war between Europe and Russia, USA and China is not just possible, but inevitable!

IMO the superapp notion is a bit exaggerated. Lots of the Asian superapps superfeatures are just random buttons on random places created in decisions decentralized/scope creeping/workers overqualified/anemic management workplace that launch WebViews out of nowhere. The prerequisites are nonexistent leadership and smart yet business ignorant workers.

If you fill a few urban core skyscrapers to the brim with bunch of STEM/CS/CE uni grad kids, they'll start stuffing anything they are allowed to touch with super futuristic string theory thing for absolutely no reason. Someone's going to implement crypto mining feature on the live app. Others start doing LLMs working together with image generation teams while the image creation team with a quirky boss will have their own. That's how superapp gets created.

Also, Google is an American company, unless I'm grossly mistaken. You guys have a superapp and a superapp company already.

I think it's all due to Apple:

* Apple developer program is $99/year everywhere and making iOS apps without a Mac used to be impossible and is still difficult, so naturally there's more demand for miniapp platforms like WeChat and LINE in countries with way lower purchasing parity. LINE miniapps are booming now that the yen is so weak. But the West doesn't have this issue.

* Superapps typically grow out of chat and payment platforms and Apple owns such a massive share of that in the West. They're not going to build miniapps into Apple Messages or Apple Pay.

Isn't emacs the original super-app? :>

I always wondered if mobile networks/tarriffs had a factor in it. If the super-app negotiates with the carrier to get zero-rated, it gains an immediate edge over other free-standing players.

There's so much happening in the mobile app space that a lot of westerners aren't aware of, it's kinda crazy when you think about it. Line has 178 million active users across its largest markets (and hundreds of millions of accounts), WeChat has 1.3 billion users (and 3.7 million apps on its platform), QQ has hundreds of millions, etc.

Granted, Facebook apparently has 3 billion active users per month.

I searched for the string ”lic”, found nothing. But I’m on a phone.

Me being harsh (I admit) on the aesthetics doesn't imply diminishing the actual utility of the font.

I also have to use LINE every day, and I can't say I love it (but it's either this or Facebook). They've been trying to push LINE Premium and LINE AI very hard (at least in Japan) to the point that some features are now blocked (e.g. you cannot unsend photos anymore unless you pay for Premium) and I absolutely hate it.

I hate the expiring photos/videos in message threads too. Overall the UX is clunky. I also use Wechat everyday, and even though their UX is also pretty clunky, it's still somehow efficient, and doesn't it bother me as much as having to use Line.

Exactly this. Instead of inventing another useless typeface noone is gonna use (I am pretty sure there are numerous typefaces exist that excel for Thai and Japanese languages) they would better work on simple case chats backup that's doesn't work if you move the app cross OS.

Oh thanks. Corrected. My brain saw TW (instead of TC) and short-circuited that as a language name for some reason!

The most common traditional Chinese language code is zh-tw, for "Taiwan," since Taiwan is the largest country to use the traditional characters.

The reason is to avoid having to pay royalties. Typefaces can get extremely expensive.

Right, surely the icons could be SVGs, with the background orbs stored as a base64 PNG (or maybe a specular lighting filter?), with the foreground icons made to move via an updating displacement map?