iPhone, Instagram, YouTube, and KakaoTalk lead the pack in Korea. YouTube is the most used app by Gen Z in Korea. It’s considered as the leading search tool, news source, and entertainment platform. KakaoTalk and Naver are more popular among those over 40.
Looking for vocabulary as well as info on KakaoTalk?
Gen Z – Z 세대 (Z se-dae)
Instagram and YouTube experienced significant growth in Korea in 2024.
Vocabulary on these and other websites is here.
Today’s Korea Herald has an interesting article about Korean websites. Believing that it’s safer to keep foreign search engines from indexing all the content on their site, many Korean websites use robots.txt files to block search engine bots from indexing a portion (or all) of their site. The robots.txt files are read by search engine bots as they index websites and the data inside this file lists which pages should not be indexed.
Korea’s KakaoTalk is a free multi-platform instant messaging app with over 70 million users (mostly in Korea). It’s available for free on Apple iOS, Google Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry phones. The app developers admitted to have been inspired by WhatsApp of the US but they’ve gone on to expand the design. It features a phone number based ID system where your contact list is automatically compared to existing Kakao users and matches are determined to be ‘friends’. KakaoTalk’s explosive growth and success derives from Korea’s quick adaptation to smartphones. Even the word ‘Kakao’ has become synonymous with chatting in Korean.
If you’re living in Korea or have Korean friends abroad, you’ll find KakaoTalk to be indispensable. While it doesn’t necessarily do anything better than other instant messaging apps, you’re guaranteed to find other Koreans using it. I frequently travel and communicate with international friends and KakaoTalk sadly has no use for me. Instead, I spend most of my time using Apple’s iMessage, FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, and Skype. KakaoTalk does support mVOIP for making calls to other Kakao users, but the quality is very poor (especially when calling internationally). I also dislike the app feature that automatically makes every contact a potential app ‘friend’.
KakaoTalk has been in the news recently for several privacy issues as they had stored personal messages on their servers for up to 10 days. Currently, messages are stored for 5-7 days and they’re looking to reduce this in the future. Full story here. On March 6, they posted a notice to the app that there were further security issues and the Emoticons, Themes, and Plus Friend features had to de-activated until users installed a new version of the app.
NHN’s Line is another popular Korean messaging app with over 100 million users globally.
