SoftBank took a stake in Line way after Line became established

I did not know that.

Would that indiciate that Korean software companies are only able to penetrate one economy at a time?

That would be a very weird, but interesting thing to investigate.

Not sure what you are getting at, but Line is deeply penetrated into South East Asia as well

Last I checked, 90% of Line users were in Japan, and Facebook messenger was most popular in SEA.

So I am simply surprised. My knowledge must be incredibly out of date.

LINE is very popular in Thailand for unclear reasons, I've heard the theory that their cute sticker packs set them apart in the early days. In the rest of SEA Whatsapp is the most popular.

Taiwan too.

Each of language groups across the globe has its own dominant and different messaging apps. US has Messenger, Korea has KakaoTalk, Japan took LINE, China built WeChat, Russia picked Telegram, and so on. The Meta Facebook/Messenger/Instagram triad isn't the global default of social apps the way it might look to people from US.

And I don't think it takes conspiracy theories to explain it, maybe users don't like platforms that isn't dominated by similar users of their primary language, or maybe there are something else that prevent app experiences optimized for two distinct cultures at the same time.

> Russia picked Telegram

With some amusing exceptions: doctors are exclusively on WhatsApp; older (60+) people are often only on WhatsApp (and pre-Microsoft Skype before that).

This isn't really true. WhatsApp was used pre-acquisition and continues to be dominant throughout LATAM, Africa, and Europe in addition to US/NA. Only in the APJC region and Russia do we see significant divergence in messaging apps.

Having traveled extensively in these places, I always theorized it was due to UX behavior aligning well with the local languages. While the countries WhatsApp dominates speak different languages, they all use the Latin alphabet. In Russia and APJC there are many non-Latin alphabets used and those languages may also use different directions for writing/reading than Romance and Germanic languages.

One advantage of Telegram over WhatsApp is that you don't have to display your phone number to your contacts and random people in group chats and blogs.

India loves what’s app. I’d like to know what the distribution of Latin vs other characters used as I’ve seen plenty on Indian languages romanized.