Which chatting app is the most popular among our generation?

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NEWs GENERATION is a program hosted by Arirang TV covering Korea’s latest trends and current affairs from the perspective of those in their twenties and thirties (millennial and Gen Zers, dubbed the ‘MZ Generation’ in Korea). For all of my appearances, visit
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Switching gears to our main discussion topic of the day. Kakaotalk is one of the most popular messenger apps in South Korea. But recently there has been an exodus of users.

Right, so what we’re really seeing is a diversification of messenger apps and social media, as people look for different platforms to use depending on their use cases.

As a Korean, KakaoTalk still takes up a large portion of how I reach out and talk to others, but today, it feels like the primary reason for that is simply because of the sheer number of people that use it here. No matter who you’re talking to, if they’re a Korean, they’ll probably have KakaoTalk on their phone.

So for general, communication purposes, KakaoTalk does the job perfectly fine, but I think a lot of people have also moved on to other platforms because it fits their needs much better.

Look at Instagram, for example, which allows you to share and post content of your own that other people can relate to, or Telegram or WhatsApp, which have far more global audiences and userbases, not just within Korea.

Then what are some chat apps or messenger apps that you two personally opt for? Which ones are gaining popularity among young adults in Korea?

For a lot of my Korean friends, I think we used to use Facebook Messenger often because most people already had Facebook accounts and used it to share posts with other friends, which is a pretty stark difference to countries like the US where Facebook is seen as a platform “for old people” to put it harshly.

When Instagram came along that felt trendier and more genuine with features like Stories, that really appealed to a wide range of people. I would say for me and my friends, it’s the messenger app that we use the most to this day.

But it’s not only Instagram that we use. Personally, I’ve also used Discord, a community-based messaging app, for meeting new friends that have common interests like gaming. It’s like the modern return of chat rooms and messaging boards, and I’ve seen more and more people use it over the years.

Of course, there’s the generational disparity that comes with iPhones, looking at what’s called the “green bubble vs. blue bubble debate” where people using iPhones see their messages sent to other iPhones as blue bubbles, and Android phones as green bubbles. Because younger people tend to use iPhones, there’s been a divide depending on what phone you use, which is crazy.

What are some distinctive traits in messenger apps that grab the attention of millennials and Gen Z in Korea?

I think some distinctive traits for a messenger app include its uniqueness and exclusivity in some ways. It first of all has to stand out from different messenger apps, like how Snapchat first created Stories and friend features that appeased to a lot of millenials in the West.

Exclusivity is also important – back in 2020 and 2021, a voice-based social media platform called Clubhouse was incredibly popular, where people could listen and join into podcast-like conversations with each other and celebrities. One of the biggest reasons behind its popularity was its invite-only system, where people who were invited by their friends could only be granted access to the app, creating a sense of exclusivity.

Of course, the thing with these distinctive traits are that they are heavily based on trends, which eventually die out over time. In many cases, these messenger apps that cater to trends don’t succeed in the long run, like what we saw with Clubhouse, but millenials and Gen Zers aren’t afraid to use new messaging apps because they know that trends change, and can quickly adapt to these new changes.

Ending off… what type of chat apps do you think will boom in popularity from now on and why?

I think that big-name messenger apps like KakaoTalk are here to stay, but there will be more messenger apps that fill various niches that will be trending in the future. People will probably get used to using multiple chat apps for different purposes, but one trend that has already boomed and will continue to boom is AI.

People can now talk to chatbots and messengers at any time of the day, which have their own personalities and appearances, like real people. There’s tools that help you adjust your tone or formality before you send a message to your boss or a professor, for example.

Some of these developments are, of course, amazing feats of technology but also really worrying, because we’re increasingly moving away from talking to other people, starting from face-to-face to even online now.

For us millenials and Gen Zers, I’m hoping that we find a way where we can incorporate these new technologies to help and support us, not hurt us.