The successful messaging app Line, which is particularly popular in Asia, has just made its foray into the largest country in the region: China. The app now has the Chinese name “Lianwo” (a play on words with “line me” or “link me”) and the app’s developers, NHN Japan, have also set up a local homepage for the app at lianwo8.com.
This new Chinese version of Line touts its iPhone, Android and Windows apps, ignoring the other versions for WP, BlackBerry and Mac, and offers most of the features familiar to its 70 million+ users – but no support for social gaming.
Line, in its guise as Lianwo, competes with WeChat – “Weixin” in Chinese – which was developed by local web giant Tencent (HKG:0700.HK – News) and already has over 200 million users. Line certainly looks cute – and its big, animated emoticons will go down well in China – but it may have arrived about a year too late to make much of an impact on WeChat among Chinese social media fans. Line launched in the summer of 2011.
Click to enlarge.
In July this year, we wrote about NHN Japan (KRX:035420) looking to expand into China, so this seems to be the result of that development. Previously, Line had targeted smartphone users in Thailand and Indonesia with things like special stickers and local social marketing collaborations.
(Thanks to Leiphone (article in Chinese) for discovering)
