CarrotIsland

Worth mentioning, as someone has for Kakao below, the LINE app has a magnitude or two or three more features than Signal. Beyond chat, the app handles payments including retail via QR, effectively has Instagram and TikTok built in, has an entire news section, and much more.

Heck, LINE the company even has permanent and pop-up merchandise stores in downtown Tokyo (Harajuku) and their own MVNO mobile carrier called LINE Mobile.

Now that said, I loathe LINE, the app. The UX is poor and the app is bloated behind belief. Only use it effectively out of necessity as someone living in Japan. The only alternative communications channel even remotely close in usage is probably Instagram chat.

I think it’s usable for free though I’m not sure to what degree since I picked up a one time payment lifetime plus subscription some years ago. I see it’s sadly now only free or monthly subscription. 😔

Have always been curious about AntennaPod. Was about to switch from PocketCasts earlier this year but turns out PocketCasts became open source a little over a year ago, October 2022.

https://blog.pocketcasts.com/2022/10/19/pocket-casts-mobile-apps-are-now-open-source/

Still curious about AntennaPod but PocketCasts has been and continues to work super well and has a web/desktop (PWA) client so may just stick with it. Mobile app repos below btw.

https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-ios

People might be hating on Majaro in part because they forgot to renew their SSL certificate at least twice and apparently even recommend users change their computer’s clock as a local hack fix for their lack of ability automate said certificate, a trivial task these days.

Quick search, looks like it expired in at least 2015 and 2022.

So glad this is the default in Japan. 🇯🇵 😌