5 little-known facts about LINE, the messenger app, that will make you see them differently

Last Updated on 2016-05-19 , 1:53 pm

I’m sure most, if not all, of us has heard of the LINE application before, right? It used to be very popular in Singapore for a period of time, where its stickers proved very popular among Singaporeans, but the hype died down soon after. Now, most users of LINE will probably be using the app not because of its messaging feature, but more of the fact that its games, like LINE: Disney Tsum Tsum, are incredibly addictive.

Are you a fan of LINE? Read about these 5 little-known facts about the app and who knows, you might just view this app differently.

How LINE was created
LINE was created back in Japan in 2011. Now that’s not the fascinating part, it’s the reason why LINE was created that is pretty cool: it was created after Japan’s devastating Tōhoku earthquake in March 2011 where communication infrastructure nationwide was damaged. NHN Japan needed to communicate and relied on internet-based resources to do so. LINE was created to facilitate the communication required.

When LINE was open to public
Response was crazy. Within 2 years, LINE has reached 200 million users and in April 2014, it was announced that LINE million users worldwide.

Group calls on LINE
Most messengers offer VOIP services on their messaging services, but LINE took it further by not just offering VOIP, but group calls on LINE as well. All you have to do is to start a group chat with the people you want to conference with, or open multiple chat windows. Tap on the “call” button, and click start.

Do some good with stickers
LINE offers limited time-offer stickers for you to purchase. And sometimes, theses stickers are not offered to generate profits, but for the users (us) to do some good. For example, the recent “Support Kumamoto” stickers were released to support and provide disaster relief. All proceeds from the sale of these stickers will go to the people affected by the earthquake.

LINE: Keep
I’m sure most of us using WhatsApp has met with this issue before: our friends sent us images, URLs and other files through chats, and if we want to view these files, we will have to either trawl through our chat history, or dig into our messy WhatsApp folder on our smartphone gallery.

LINE has recently rolled out a new feature on their app, Keep in December last year. According to them, users can store up to 1GB of media files and links to articles. This has two benefits: first, users do not have to look through their search history in order to find what they want and second, users can save on using their phone’s storage. As a bonus, the Keep is transferrable between devices, so you don’t have to worry about losing any important data so long as you follow LINE’s instructions on how to transfer account to another device.