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.
The Korean government explicitly chooses companies for these things. And those companies, Chaebols like Samsung, choose the laws.
If these Korean apps were so good, you would expect them to penetrate foreign markets. But they don't.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/06/dumb-telecom-industry-ba...
Just like how British car companies collapsed when foreign competition entered the market on equal footing, these companies will disintegrate if forced to compete.
https://www.latimes.com/world/la-xpm-2010-dec-01-la-fg-south...