Hacker News Reader

Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

"Line Chat" (a smartphone IM app in Japan) became the #1 "social network" extremely quickly in Japan and its reach is slowly spreading to other countries as well. (It blew by Facebook and its mainstream acceptance is must be well beyond Twitter by now)

http://line.naver.jp/en/

Google+ might be onto something by focusing on "IM/chat" and other means of communication, particularly outside of the united states.

View on HN

It seems obvious to me. SMS still lies outside of their control, and replacing it with something that goes through their servers would give them access to massive amounts of data otherwise unavailable to them.

Yes, but leaving out the SMS feature in the app still leaves their IM system fragmented. SMS is essential in places where data plans are prohibitively expensive.

Or unreliable. I live at Brazil, and 3G connection here is awful, everywhere !

I quite like using Line, and prefer it to WhatsApp (which most people in my contacts seem to have). My main gripe however is the lack of a browser chat option. They have a desktop client but I'd rather not have to install that just to chat at my desk. That's where Google has the edge I think.

I've used WeChat a little. It does have a decent browser option - but no desktop option which I would've liked.

Even if Google puts Hangouts in all the new Android OS releases, and with some upgrading it manually, they'd still be much better off buying either Whatsapp, Viber or Line, to get a solid base immediately of such "SMS alternative app" users.

If reports are true then they did look into this. There are just too many complications in buying these services. The popularity of these apps are regional, some have deals with carriers and they'll still have to integrate it with their own services which they're attempting to do already with their own offerings.

They'll still be faced with the same problem of enticing users to switch to their service. I think Google took the reasonable path.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com