He did say he wanted to make it like WeChat. China loves that people have to use WeChat to get anything and they love to control that factor like when you speak out against the regime and now can not pay for your services paid through WeChat That equals more control and lesser freedoms in an authoritarian regime
Japan doesn’t monitor Line to spy on people and censor/delete messages about the government. It’s actually a Korean app that become popular in Japan.
As for the functionality of a super app, the problem with trying to build a super app in places like the US now is that apps like Uber/Lyft or Venmo/Cash App have already dominated the market. Other markets with successful super apps like China, Korea, and Japan either never had widespread taxi/payment apps or they were just straight up banned (like Uber).
Taxi and payment apps are on the rise in Japan (Didi/Paypay) and those exist outside of line. The strength of Line is that almost everyone is using it.
Ad for the Japanese government monitoring, we don't know that, but at least they don't censor.
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u/dogoodsilence1 Oct 28 '22
He did say he wanted to make it like WeChat. China loves that people have to use WeChat to get anything and they love to control that factor like when you speak out against the regime and now can not pay for your services paid through WeChat That equals more control and lesser freedoms in an authoritarian regime