Google Play / communication / LINE: CALLS & MESSAGES
REVIEW
LINE is the most useful messenger you've never installed and the most frustrating one if you have.
Dominant in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand, irrelevant almost everywhere else, and bolted to a super-app sprawl that nobody outside East Asia asked for.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
LINE: Calls & Messages
LINE (LY CORPORATION)
OUR SCORE
5.8
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 3.2
PRICE
Free
In-app purchases
LINE is two products in one binary. One is the messenger that the populations of Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand actually live on — the assumption layer beneath every coordinated dinner, every small-business customer-service channel, every “send me your LINE” exchanged at a conference. The other is the super-app shell that LY Corporation keeps strapping to the messenger: payments, manga, news, branded Official Accounts, a sticker economy with real revenue, and the residue of whatever consumer experiment was launched last quarter. The first product is genuinely indispensable. The second is why the Android rating sits at 3.23 across nearly a quarter-million reviews.
The reason both products share a binary is straightforward. LINE the messenger owns the network in its core markets so completely that LY can use it as a distribution channel for everything else, and the everything-else is more profitable than messaging. That logic is sound for the company and unpleasant for the user, especially the user who installed it to chat with one cousin in Osaka and now has a home tab full of news cards and sticker promotions.
The honest read in 2026 is that LINE rewards the user who needs its network and punishes the user who doesn’t. If half the people you talk to are in Japan, the friction is the price of being reachable, and the friction has been the price for fifteen years. If none of them are, the messenger you already use is better for your situation, and the rating distribution on the Play Store is telling you which user you are.
LINE is two products in one binary: the messenger Japan runs on, and the super-app shell the parent company keeps strapping to it.
FEATURES
LINE is a free messaging app from LY Corporation, the Naver / SoftBank joint venture that runs the dominant chat service across Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia. The 1:1 and group chat layer is standard for the category — text, voice notes, photo, video, file attachments — sitting alongside voice and video calling, including group calls.
Stickers are the platform's defining cultural artifact. LINE's sticker store sells branded packs (anime tie-ins, regional mascots, corporate campaigns) at typically a few hundred yen each, and stickers are large, animated, often sound-enabled, and used in conversation the way Western messengers use emoji. The economy around them is real — independent illustrators sell sticker sets through LINE Creators Market and split revenue with LY.
The app is also a shell for the LINE super-app stack: LINE Pay (mobile payments, deep in Japan), LINE Manga (digital comics, currently the largest manga distributor in Japan by revenue), Official Accounts (a CRM channel for businesses to broadcast to subscribers), LINE Stickers, the LINE NEWS portal, and historically LINE NFT. The home tab surfaces this sprawl whether you use any of it or not.
Free download, ad-supported in some surfaces, with in-app purchases for stickers, premium themes, coins, and add-on services. Available globally on the Play Store but the network effect is regional.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Where LINE owns the network, it owns it completely. In Japan, "do you have LINE?" is the assumption — your dentist, your landlord, your delivery driver, and your favorite ramen shop all have Official Accounts. Switching cost is infinite because everyone you'd switch with is already on it. That's not a product win, but the network it sits on top of is the real product.
The sticker culture is genuinely distinct. Stickers carry tone in a way emoji don't, and the catalog spans from Sanrio characters to indie illustrators to one-off corporate campaigns. For a certain register of casual Japanese-language communication, this is the medium the messenger was designed for, and competitors haven't replicated it.
Voice and video calling work fine over decent networks. The April 2026 update kept the call stack ticking along without obvious regressions.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The 3.23 Play Store rating across 238,000 reviews is not noise. Android users report account-recovery friction (lose your phone without a backup and your chat history is often gone), aggressive notification permissions, push notifications that ignore Do Not Disturb on some devices, and a settings menu that has metastasized from a chat app's into something closer to a regional bank's. Battery drain on background sync is a recurring complaint.
The super-app sprawl is the second structural problem. The home tab surfaces LINE NEWS articles, sticker promotions, Official Account broadcasts, and various LY Corporation cross-sells whether you want them or not. Western users coming from WhatsApp or Signal or iMessage will find the density disorienting and the opt-outs scattered. The app is doing a lot of jobs at once, and the chat experience is the one that gets crowded.
Outside East Asia, the network simply isn't there. Installing LINE to talk to one friend in Tokyo is fine; installing it expecting general messaging utility is not.
CONCLUSION
Install LINE if you live, work, or have close ties in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, or Indonesia — there is no substitute and there will not be one. Skip it if you don't, because the app is built around a network you're not in and a super-app stack that doesn't serve you. The 3.23 rating reflects an app that's essential for its core market and visibly tired for everyone else, and a 2026 cleanup pass on Android notifications, account recovery, and home-tab clutter would do more for the score than another sticker campaign.