February 25, 2026
Kakao Talk Is Making Me LOCO
I just wanted a Beeper Bridge, instead I get to reverse engineer a proprietary chat app
Preramble
If you're not Korean, consider yourself lucky for 2 reasons:
You've never had to look yourself in the mirror and say "in 80 years my people will not exist due to something fundamentally broken with our society and culture" You've never had to use KakaoTalk
For the uninitiated, KakaoTalk is the predominant chat app of South Korea. It is used by 95% of South Koreans, and 97% of internet users . You don't ask for someone's phone number, you grab their Kakao. It's not merely about peer to peer messaging, as it serves a far more vital function as the essential interface between South Koreans and anything in their society: shopping, government, hospitals, education, etc. If you're familiar with the relationship between WeChat and China, or WhatsApp and India, or LINE and Japan, it's pretty much the same thing but Korean.
This UI is burned into the occipital lobe of every South Korean.
Why do they have dominant market share? At first I assumed they were just a chaebol and leveraged some classic Asia style cronyism to lock out all competitors. But no such thing exists, but then I realized the answer was much simpler: South Korea's suffocating culture of homogeneity. Nobody wants to propose using anything else, nobody wants to stick out, nobody wants to be different . This is probably why Koreans have the flyest digital avatars on any MMORPG they play on; they need to stunt somewhere and it's not going to be irl.
Korean uniformity, literally.
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