KakaoTalk

The South Korean government said it will strengthen legal and administrative regulations to rein in excessive concentration of power in the local platform market led by tech giants Naver and Kakao.In a comprehensive plan by the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Fair Trade Commission and other government agencies, the government will set up a new guideline targeting digital platform businesses, elaborating on specific rule-breaking cases in the sector.The authorities will also revise anti-trust laws to tighten…

Telegram has been rather hands off on its old TON Blockchain it developed years ago, but now the company wants to let users sell their own name for profit.Photo: nikkimeel (Shutterstock)How much is your digital identity worth to you, or at least, how much is it worth in crypto? Well thanks to instant messaging app Telegram, you can soon find out. Telegram has plans to let users hang their digital identifier up on a public marketplace to see whether other folks think your name is also worth a good chunk of change.Telegram…

Kate Park / TechCrunch: Kakao says it will remove an external payment link from its KakaoTalk messaging app on Play Store, after Google blocked it from issuing updates on July 6 — South Korean messaging giant Kakao confirmed today it will remove an external payment option after Google blocked the South Korean company behind KakaoTalk from issuing updates. Kate Park / TechCrunch: Kakao says it will remove an external payment link from its KakaoTalk messaging app on Play Store, after Google blocked…

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. App Annie says global spending across iOS and Google Play is up to $135 billion in 2021, and that figure will likely be higher when its annual report, including third-party…

The latest software update for KakaoTalk, South Korea's most popular mobile messaging app, remained suspended for a week on the Google Play Store on Thursday, following the refusal by tech giant Kakao to comply with Google's new in-app payment policy.Google turned down Kakao's submission application for the latest 9.8.6 version of KakaoTalk for Android on Google Play on June 30, citing Kakao's non-compliance with the policy, according to Kakao. Google's decision is in line with its new payment policy announced in April,…

Google has blocked Play Store updates to the popular messaging app KakaoTalk in South Korea for refusing to comply with its billing policy. The app will remain functional but the developers won’t be able to push updates to it through Play Store. It is the first victim of Google’s enforced Play policy in South Korea, local publication News1 reports (via).The Play policy in question here is the one that requires developers to use Google’s first-party billing system for in-app purchases in apps distributed through Play…

During yesterday's Google I/O keynote, there was a moment that stood out to me that may have been lost on a lot of folks. While giving examples of new apps featured on Wear OS 3, Google took the time to call out KakaoTalk. I won’t lie. I stood up, pointed my finger at my computer monitor, and screeched some version of “AHA! I was right!” If you already know what KakaoTalk is, you likely are Korean, Korean-American, have a ton of Korean friends, love K-pop and K-dramas, or have lived / are living in Korea. You can see…