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LINE limitations

While mainland Chinese people are under pressure from a ‘network effect’ to use the WeChat messaging service, those in Taiwan seem to be having a similar ‘network effect’ around LINE, so if you have Chinese contacts from both sides of the Strait you will probably want to subscribe to both services.

You may wish to be aware of these limitations of LINE which I have observed:

1. The old “Lite” version of LINE (which became unavailable after February 2022) was not able to port its chat history across devices or to/from the larger version of LINE, even after the May 2019 update which said “you can now log in to LINE and LINE Lite at the same time”—yes you could, but only if you logged in to the *full* version of LINE first—if you started with the Lite version and then installed the full version, the Lite version would spontaneously delete history as soon as the full version was registered. You could however use an extra copy of the Lite version on a second device in much the same way as you can use the Web version—this wouldn’t delete history on the *original* device provided you selected the correct option during setup, but you still didn’t get that history copied to the new device; the only supported way to copy history to new devices was by using the more resource-heavy non-Lite version and backing up to Google. This is now only of historical interest as the Lite version is no longer supported by their network.

2. You can rename LINE contacts (which is useful if their self-chosen nicknames are confusing and you’re not able to keep chat history to remind you who it is), but:

the new names are limited to 20 characters (so you can’t put “Sam’s friend Bing in Berlin” unless you have a good shorthand—I suppose it’s not so bad for users fully literate in Chinese characters), and
sometimes the system spontaneously reverts *some* of your contact names to their self-chosen nicknames, especially during migration to a new device, which is particularly unhelpful if it coincides with a history loss.

3. The only clue you have that someone might have blocked you is you no longer see “R” or “Read” acknowledgements against messages you send. But that might also mean they just didn’t open your chat (and may still have seen part of your most recent message in the chats-list or system notifications).

4. In the full version of LINE, beware pressing “Like” on Timeline (now called “Voom”) posts (a function limited in visibility to certain East Asian countries from September 2023): by default your *entire contact list* can see *every* post you pressed “Like” on (this behaviour is different from that of WeChat Moments, which makes your “Like” visible only to mutually-shared contacts).

5. There is a 1-minute timeout on uploading videos to “Voom” causing failures if you have a slow ADSL uplink (WhatsApp had a similar problem for individual media posts before I stopped using WhatsApp due to legal issues)

6. Line might not deliver messages sent to you by a new contact before you accepted that contact’s “add” request. Furthermore, Line might not alert you to “add” requests until you check within the app.

Pictures sent via LINE are always converted to JPG, and the recipient must save (to a folder called Pictures/LINE) to access resolutions higher than the zoomed-out screen—this screen’s “pinch to zoom” does not add more detail.

Legal

The notes on this page are provided in the hope that they are useful, but they are not official instructions and may contain mistakes. Your use of them is at your own risk. All material © Silas S. Brown unless otherwise stated. Bing is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp. Google is a trademark of Google LLC. WeChat is a trademark of Tencent Holdings Limited. WhatsApp is a trademark of WhatsApp Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks I mentioned without realising are trademarks of their respective holders.