Fun fact: western ride sharing apps don't work in South Korea, and this company also makes the leading rideshare app in the country.
I was forced to make an account on the mobile chat app in order to log into their rideshare app, on a recent trip to Seoul. The UX was not great... not to mention that it was mostly in Korean. I had a lot of trouble. They didn't strike me as the most professional operation..
I lived in South Korea some years ago, and it was interesting how they had a separate ecosystem of apps and services. “KakaoTalk” and “Naver” had approximately the roles that WhatsApp/Meta and Google have in the West.
I think it’s great how these managed to thrive, despite increased competition from multinational companies. In many other countries, local tech companies seem to have become nearly irrelevant over the past decade, which is a sad to see.
It's the result of protectionist government policy. The policies are protectionist not just against foreign entry but also against entry of new products into the market. The government picks technology winners. Unsurprisingly, the government doesn't do a great job of this. Infamously it mandated usage of ActiveX and Internet Explorer for banking long after ActiveX had its time in the sun (the government made this the mandate in 1996 and didn't reform it until 2021!)
In case of Kakao Taxi vs Uber, it was Uber's unwillingness to work with existing taxi operators that killed any chance Uber had in the Korean market. Kakao (at least until they became dominant) acted more like an agent that sends additional customers to existing independent taxi drivers while Uber kept trying to find legal loopholes to bypass the taxi licensing system. S Korea is a civil law country, and its courts have no patience for actors whose entire legal strategy is to subvert the intent of the laws, and that was the end for Uber there.
To be accurate, Uber didn't abide by laws in most countries it went up against. It was a little slimy but also the taxi systems of most places were very entrenched. I remember never enjoying riding taxis in San Francisco for years, the cars were gross and the drivers were grumpy and generally shady about having their "credit card readers being broken" so they didn't have to pay the fees. Uber and a bunch of companies did and end run around those very politically entrenched systems and I certainly am happy to have clean, friendly, safe, modern rides with good tech where reviews keep things in line and payment is easy and I can share my location easily and know I'm going to end up at the right place way better.
Exactly. Uber was shady, but that kind of shadiness and willingness to ignore laws is necessary to bring positive change in a highly corrupt society. It's a lot like Batman: when the police are completely ineffectual or corrupt and working for organized crime, you need a vigilante who ignores the laws that just protect the criminals.
However, in better-run and not-so-corrupt societies like Korea, it's not necessary and probably downright harmful.
> However, in better-run and not-so-corrupt societies like Korea, it's not necessary and probably downright harmful.
South Korea was under varying levels of dictatorship from the Korean War until the Sixth Republic in 1987. Roh Tae-woo, the first president after authoritarian rule, was imprisoned for corruption. Roh Moo-hyun, the President from 2003-2008 was investigated for corruption and died by suicide rather than face charges. Lee Myung-bak, his successor, was imprisoned for corruption. Park Geun-hye, his successor, was imprisoned for corruption.
I don't know that South Korea is the poster child for a "better-run and not not-so-corrupt" society.
>I don't know that South Korea is the poster child for a "better-run and not not-so-corrupt" society.
It's not a poster child, but the US sets such a low bar that SK looks great by comparison.
Note also that the US isn't so visibly corrupt at the federal level; it's at the local levels where it's really no better than the typical poster children for corrupt countries. Taxis are a completely local (municipal) issue.
Yeah, I wouldn't go quite that far. Here's Samsung's heir, convicted in court of bribery, getting a special presidential pardon because, and I quote, he's "needed back at the helm to spearhead economic recovery post-pandemic".
Not sure I'd call Korea and its countless cases of political corruption with Chaebol more and more appearing to be basically running the show "not-so-corrupt".
When you mention it, as a Linux user at the time I struggled a lot with the ActiveX thing… Eventually I think I gave up.
I had no idea that stuff was government-mandated.
It was government mandated but it was an attempt by their government to strengthen security at the time when they couldn't import stronger crypto. Then it became established and hard to remove.
>Due to restrictions on the export of cryptography from the United States, standard 128-bit SSL encryption was unavailable in Korea. Web browsers were only available to Koreans with weakened 40-bit encryption. In the late 1990s, the Korea Internet & Security Agency developed its own 128-bit symmetric block cipher named SEED and used ActiveX to mount it in web browsers. This soon became a domestic standard, and the country's Financial Supervisory Service used the technology as a security screening standard. ActiveX spread rapidly in Korea. In 2000, export restrictions were lifted, allowing the use of full-strength SSL anywhere in the world. Most web browsers and national e-commerce systems adopted this technology, while Korea continued to use SEED and ActiveX.
I heard Korea had a problematic mandatory Internet login wall specifically built for IE with ActiveX on XP, and that that made use of Linux and/or Firefox complicated.
Funnily it lead to creation of PC F2P gaming culture too for some reason.
Running IE in wine wasn't always the easiest thing in the world, and when you were specifically running it to try and use weird integrations even less so.
While you're right, in the specific case of navigation apps (Google maps) or apps that need navigation data (uber), it's typically because of the Geospatial Information Management Act. High-quality mapping data isn't allowed to leave the physical borders of Korea so most foreign companies just stop trying. Nowadays it's just protectionism, but the original justification was to make it harder for north korea to aim artillery.
Just like how British car companies collapsed when foreign competition entered the market on equal footing, these companies will disintegrate if forced to compete.
> The reason American apps penetrate the world usually is because America is a superpower that has almost colonised the web.
I live in the USA and EU, and the reason that I prefer a Samsung display in almost all cases is because it is the best product. Korea has not colonized us, but the product is often superior, so that is why I buy it.
Why is it that Korean software cannot do the same? I find it very interesting, and I mean to ask this in a very neutral/curious way.
Now that you bring it up, I can't recall ever (knowingly) using a piece of Korean software that wasn't a game or baked into a phone's firmware. Does seem kind of odd considering how much Korean hardware there is in my life.
TVs for most of their existence were simple devices, with mostly a few different consumer relevant parameters, which were mostly objective.
Apps on the other hand strongly reflect the philosophy of usage, control, privacy etc, and the design aesthetic of their creators. Different countries/cultures have radically different philosophies, and old countries have aesthetics that go back thousands of years. Using apps from the creators of a different culture almost certainly causes significant friction with your own culture's philosophy and aesthetics.
To give a related example. I don't know Korea, but many in the English speaking world are marginally know of Japanese TV shows - you know with the crazy antics. Imagine that you were forced to consume only that form of TV, and how jarring that would be compared to your own philosophical and aesthetic inclinations. The same with Apps.
> The reason American apps penetrate the world usually is because America is a superpower that has almost colonised the web.
Love how the word "colonise" is thrown out without any thought.
Please tell us one example where America enacted a hostile takeover of a Korean site, and extracted its resources solely for the benefit of American interests.
This doesn't really fit with the way the US government ensured dominance of its tech sector globally in the 80s, 90s, and even early 2000s. It was not a fair competition by any stretch of the imagination and involved a lot of strong-arming by the US government abusing its leverage.
As if those were sufficient or necessary. Even a passing familiarity with the history of computing would show that these had little effect. A deep understanding would reveal what actually did.
If you created it, then you're not colonizing it in any meaningful sense of the word (you are using the word to invoke implications of historical atrocities, etc.)
Each of language groups across the globe has its own dominant and different messaging apps. US has Messenger, Korea has KakaoTalk, Japan took LINE, China built WeChat, Russia picked Telegram, and so on. The Meta Facebook/Messenger/Instagram triad isn't the global default of social apps the way it might look to people from US.
And I don't think it takes conspiracy theories to explain it, maybe users don't like platforms that isn't dominated by similar users of their primary language, or maybe there are something else that prevent app experiences optimized for two distinct cultures at the same time.
This isn't really true. WhatsApp was used pre-acquisition and continues to be dominant throughout LATAM, Africa, and Europe in addition to US/NA. Only in the APJC region and Russia do we see significant divergence in messaging apps.
Having traveled extensively in these places, I always theorized it was due to UX behavior aligning well with the local languages. While the countries WhatsApp dominates speak different languages, they all use the Latin alphabet. In Russia and APJC there are many non-Latin alphabets used and those languages may also use different directions for writing/reading than Romance and Germanic languages.
One advantage of Telegram over WhatsApp is that you don't have to display your phone number to your contacts and random people in group chats and blogs.
With some amusing exceptions: doctors are exclusively on WhatsApp; older (60+) people are often only on WhatsApp (and pre-Microsoft Skype before that).
LINE is very popular in Thailand for unclear reasons, I've heard the theory that their cute sticker packs set them apart in the early days. In the rest of SEA Whatsapp is the most popular.
When I went ~5 years ago, I was completely unable to use the taxi apps due to lack of Korean bank acct. This lead to being unable to even hail a cab at times - they mostly seemed to pick up fares from the apps. At one point I managed to get one of their attentions - and was told that he wouldn’t drive me because I was an “outsider”. Not sure if he was actually xenophobic, didn’t want to deal with a cash fare, didn’t want to deal with my lack of Korean, or just had a misunderstanding. A later “successful” cab ride put me going halfway across the city through the mountain. I had to call a date I’d had and get her to
explain to the driver that we were going the wrong way. The perils of going to new country underprepared I suppose.
One thing that surprised me about SK is that they have so many local alternatives for tech products that I thought were global. And the global/US version has almost no market penetration. An example of this was Google, at least when I visited in early 2015.
It's great that American software monopolies do not have access to Korean data and that Korean companies can create jobs hiring Koreans and add to the GDP. ALL sovereign countries should practice sovereign software and safeguard PII of its citizens
It's rather inconvenient for non-Koreans but you were never the intended audience nor is there much care for foreigners these days-there is growing hostility towards foreign tourists who have flocked to Japan and Korea in recent years.
> ALL sovereign countries should practice sovereign software and safeguard PII of its citizens
Most countries are incapable of this and when they do try they do a worse job.
My government has a website that allows you to fetch a person’s voting centre by knowing their ID number. Our ID numbers are sequential. Therefore you can use that website to get approximate location for literally everyone.
My government also has a website to request passports online. I was playing with it and it turns out they have an open GraphQL endpoint that lets me query billing transactions for _everyone_.
> Therefore you can use that website to get approximate location for literally everyone.
In America, before the Internet took off, every year everyone would get a book called the "white pages" that had the name, address, and phone number, of everyone who lived in their city.
The American view of privacy is that "openness makes for a civil society".
Although one can argue that hasn't been working out well for us lately ..
Likewise, marriages are publicly recorded and accessible online, as are all property purchases, births, deaths, and even property tax payments.
Though for some reason we consider income taxes to be super secret. Everything else is public, but not those! (How much cash someone put down to buy a house? Public. How much money that person makes? Not public. How much money everyone donates to politicians? Public.)
> Therefore you can use that website to get approximate location for literally everyone.
Approximate address, surely. Addresses are ... usually not very secret in the first place, though? It'd be absolutely fascinating if your government not only tracked everyone's location but assigned their voting center by current location, but, well,
The voting centre is typically the closest public school to where you live.
So when I say location here I mean the neighborhood where you live.
Also the main concern isn’t the government. They clearly already have the data and will always have that data. They also have the actual address of people.
The main concern is literally anyone can access the data and this thread is about countries protecting PII lol.
In some Western countries voter's lists with names and addresses are publicly accessible, if I understand correctly. Helps to make sure government doesn't add dead souls to vote for them.
> It'd be absolutely fascinating if your government not only tracked everyone's location but assigned their voting center by current location, but, well,
That's exactly what happens in Turkiye. I assume GP is there.
IMHO That's where the software model could change if more countries gave a serious shake at managing national services.
As you point out it's hard and few can do it, so getting more common open source platforms would be a natural evolution. Then relying on global providers that act as a service developer instead of a service owner would still be a huge difference.
That sounds great. I imagine it would turn out the same way using local transit has. Some are awesome like the netherlands and some are hostile towards users that you can’t even properly use it if you arrive too late at night because no one is available like france.
Everyone in this thread seems to thinks government is able to get things done. That is not what my last 40 years of life has shown me.
Most countries ARE capable of that. Or rather, most people of a country don't like platforms not dominated by their own primary language, and this is passively achieved by that tendency.
Lots of Russian stuffs on the Internet come through Telegram, meanwhile China has Weibo and TikTok, Korea does its thing in KakaoTalk and Facebook/Insta, Japan uses LINE along Twitter/Insta instead, so on and so forth. Everyone could be on Facebook, but that isn't what is going on.
The Interweb isn't so global, and English isn't the lingua franca of all communications. It's just the perception one experiences through an American door, though the Web do tend to be more developed in en-US.
Why would we think that every country blocking out foreign companies would result in better software being written for consumers in that country?
I think some tiny amount of protectionism can be necessary to get a domestic industry started, when it is important for reasons beyond giving access to the best products like national security. Especially in edge cases like competing with foreign companies with the backing of their state government or an international market that has degenerated to a monopoly. But ultimately free trade makes better products and international consumers richer and is the desired end goal, not every nation rewriting the same tech stack and providing local flavors of software solving similar problems.
> not every nation rewriting the same tech stack and providing local flavors of software solving similar problems.
Why not? Isn't Diversity good? Wouldn't it be nice to have multiple colors, implementations of things rather than the monopolistic (and probably American) beige?
Diversity comes from (fair) competition. Why would I not make American monopoly beige if it works for America locally? But if the foreign company is already that color I have to differentiate somehow. I have to compete on whatever I know about the domestic market, and force the foreign companies to learn and adapt to reach parity with me.
That whole process works in reverse too, where I have to reach parity with the large multinational company on all the features the domestic audience cares about. That last step is usually the first one to be missed when a government hands a monopoly on a tech vertical to a local company with protectionist policies. (And often they don’t just do it to insulate them from foreign competition, they will end up insulating them from domestic too as an artifact of the way these relationships reinforce themselves)
So, the state should intervene to help level the playing field to reach fair competition. In practice though it rarely stops there and instead works to insulate the domestic company from any competition. Which results in inferior products.
It is not diversity to have many people reinventing and maintaining essentially the same wheel. Exceptionally, this is necessary for national security purposes, but in the common case this is actually a poor deal for local consumers who prop up a worse product.
This is rich, coming from someone in a country where everyone still uses SMS to chat with their friends and family. Other countries already have far superior messaging apps than whatever America has produced, but Americans refuse to give up their SMS just like they refuse to give up their guns.
I’m not sure what this is supposed to prove? There are lots of different messaging apps with very high market share in the US versus a WhatsApp monoculture. A lot of people using SMS are actually using iMessage, and historically one of the reasons it’s won is because US telecoms went to unlimited SMS messaging when competing with each other, whereas foreign monopoly telecoms charged prices per SMS making messaging apps on data more competitive.
iMessage is a better experience and also degrades gracefully to sms for people who aren’t on the platform, unlike almost all other messaging apps where I have to make sure they have the app installed.
Facebook messenger has like 50% market penetration with its own suite of features. Snapchat is next and offers a very different user experience.
Apps without compelling reasons to exist like Google allo lose.
> Why would we think that every country blocking out foreign companies would result in better software being written for consumers in that country?
Why do you think foreign companies are automatically better? Is American software written by non-Americans automatically best? I find this to be incredibly arrogant.
Sovereign software would break the open Internet as it exists today. A lot more work needs to be done on open protocols before interoperation would work nearly as well as the products we have today.
Not to mention the colossal waste of effort in engineering hours, the disparity in quality between rich and poor countries, etc.
Reuse is good. I would rather see open data and open protocols too, but look at Cambridge analytica, a scandal that was a direct consequence of giving people control over their data!
Right, which is exactly why it's dangerous to allow foreign (that is, US) companies to control your citizens' data, particularly if that data is not safeguarded against those foreign governments (e.g. due to "national security" laws).
yes, and they also have the power to tell multinationals where they are allowed, geographically, to store the locals' data.
the grandparent has invented a fake problem (data regionalization, as though it cannot be addressed with regulation) and has conflated a nationalist-socialist desire to replace a foreign private enterprise with a nationalized public one. it's nationalist because it assumes that the nation needs to own it, and socialist because at the national level a public solution is proposed.
the solution, in turn, doesn't actually solve the regionalization problem unless the state organization running the nationalized ride share app is required through further legislation to keep the data local -- the same legislation that would be needed to regulate private entities, except now it's the government regulating itself since the public national ride share app is operated and owned by the government, and is now open to all the problems of corruption that plague every command economy.
But by all means, be more like North Korea, South Korea. Just nationalize everything. You don't want American influence. Those American monopolies and American dollars have really made you worse off in the last seventy years. /s
I have a problem with your comment. It's extremely condescending and emotionally charged.
Data sovereignty/regionalization is not a fake problem. Many governments around the world are trying to keep foreign companies from accessing their citizens data.
A sovereign country wants to create its industry by keeping foreign companies out isn't communism. Much of the West does this already and uses regulation/fines/antitrust lawsuits to keep em down.
Amusingly, U.S. Congress has been making a ruckus about this so-called “fake problem” lately (and I can’t fault them) even though TikTok already stores American data in Oracle Cloud on American soil.
> It's great that American software monopolies [...] and that Korean companies can create jobs hiring Koreans and add to the GDP.
Largely agree with this, but this
> do not have access to Korean data
> safeguard PII of its citizens
Is incredibly ironic on a post "I found a 1-click exploit in South Korea's biggest mobile chat app". Zerodium pays $1 million for a WhatsApp (the Western equivalent of Kakaotalk) one-click exploits. As a consequence, any new exploits must be incredibly involved, else they'll already have been cashed in (and patched after being reported/exploited). Whereas this Kakaotalk exploit is trivial.
Americans share their PII with the FAANGs, us in Korea share it with the entire world because, as this article shows, security is absolutely atrocious.
> That's because the Korean and Japanese internets are far older than most of Americas giants. They also were made for locals.
Google launched in 1998. Naver didn't launch search until 2000. Copying American tech companies but targeting your own market is a common theme (see China, Latin America, Southeast Asia, etc.). Let's not pretend it's not the case here or Korea is somehow special.
If you want to think that then that's fine by me. Would be interesting to see the usage of Naver in 2001 versus Google in 2001 in terms of percentage of local population. (even if Google had 3 years head start)
Yahoo was before Google and Japan has been on Yahoo forever. Yahoo is American but they engorged on it in Japan.
Google is just a copy of a copy.
Koreans and Japanese were definitely ahead of the West in both phone and internet uptake.
> The UX was not great... not to mention that it was mostly in Korean. I had a lot of trouble. They didn't strike me as the most professional operation..
What does the seemingly very common-sense fact that a South Korean app was "mostly"(?) in Korean have to do with the UX or with it not being "professional"?
What language were you expecting the South Korean app to be in, French?
Surely there's no obligation to internationalize your app, but taxis are commonly used by tourists so you'd imagine it would be a good business decision.
The common language most often used when people from Japan, China, or South Korea visit each other’s countries is English. All three groups of people are more likely to know English than either of the other two languages. The same can be said for the remaining group that doesn’t include people from those three countries.
> Imagine supporting the 2nd most popular language in the world. CRAZY right?
Why are you fixating on supporting the 2nd most popular language, shouldn't it support the 1st most popular language first? Or why not jump straight to the 3rd?
also, if you add internationalization support for 1 language in your app, it’s trivial (these days) to add other languages. My point is they should just add support for other languages, like chinese, japanese, english, etc.
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>Still more usable than Google Maps though, which will only give you a not so good train schedule. No walking directions at all.
That's interesting, because Google Maps here in Japan is absolutely fantastic: train schedules are always correct (and updated with delays etc.), walking directions are good, etc. I guess having a big office here in Tokyo is a big part of this.
The translating part is by far the hardest. But there are services to organize a crowd sourced translations of your app / service.
Booth android and iOS app building frameworks will try to force you into using variables for every rendered string (allowing you to change them easily and in one place - f.ex. based on user / device settings).
They don't operate in Korea but they do provide Korean translations which seems to suggest they consider inbound tourists as a target market. It is quite telling the Korean apps do not.
Uber attempted to operate in Korea and failed. At that point keeping a Korean translation would have been a simple matter of maintaining and updating it for the small returns that it brought in, coupled with the knowledge that simply maintaining a Korean translation for their vastly more entrenched service ensured no chance of competition from one of the few non-American firms to succeed in the same space as them.
As others already mentioned, Uber does work in SKorea (or at least Seoul), altough it's not really an uber, afaik its just a proxy for kakaotaxi while using Uber's interface
Korea uses KakaoT as a ride hailing app. But all it does is hail taxis. Uber in Korea just hails Uber branded taxis. I have no idea if they are officially affiliated with Uber or not.
Uber operates through a local JV with Tmap called UT. Taxi drivers typically sign up for both Kakao T and UT, except when exclusively branded. (Kakao T and Uber both operate branded taxis.)
Some foreigners claim they have KakaoBank accounts, but they may be confusing them with KakaoPay accounts, or maybe the account is in their spouse’s name or whatever.
Suffice it to say: for foreigners without a Korean ID number it’s a definite no and with a Korean ID it’s a likely no.
And good news: they’re not called “ARCs” anymore. No more “Alien Registration Card” extraterrestrial stigma. Now it’s just the regular stigma.
I (living in SK for twenty years) do remember reading within the last year(?) that the government corrected the legal regulation that prevented foreigners from joining an online bank like Kakao Bank (it was a catch-22 situation, the rules required the bank to verify an account holder's ID using a system that only worked for citizens... the procedure to verify a foreigner required face-to-face verification with documents, but online banks by law were not allowed to have brick-and-mortar offices for customers to visit).
However, I have yet to read that any of the online banks have changed their procedure to take advantage of these changed regulations.
I totally don't understand the comments under this comment or this comment, apart from about 8 months when Uber was being sold to SK, uber has worked just fine daily for the past 5+ years for me? Even during the "government crackdown" phase, X stopped working but although the press said uber shut down, uber worked just fine, only X shut down.
I hear this comment time and time and time again and I wonder where it comes from, I'm happy to show literally years and years of uber receipts from South Korea.
Uber has operated in Korea for the past couple years through a local JV with Tmap called UT. It's the next most popular taxi hailing service after Kakao T.
If I’m not mistaken, society used to be structured quite differently. Kids were not grouped so much by age in school, and with so much intermixing of ages in society, young kids were forced to grow up quite quickly.
For example, Alexander Hamilton began working full-time at the age of 11.
Nowadays, we try very hard to shield children from the realities of the world, sanitize their fairy tales, etc. but that’s a relatively recent practice.
