LINE
Stay close, wherever summer takes you
LINE brings your family, friends, and colleagues into one quiet, reliable place. Free calls, messages, and more, all on your phone.
LINE launched in June 2011, in the weeks after the Great East Japan Earthquake. The phone networks were overwhelmed, but internet connections stayed up. A small team at NHN Japan built a messaging app in a matter of days so that people could reach their families when the phone lines were silent. That origin is not a marketing story. It is the reason the app was designed the way it was: fast, light, and built to work when things are difficult.
Over the following years, LINE grew into something much larger than an emergency tool. It became the default way that people in Japan communicate. Not just young people. Grandparents use it to video-call their grandchildren. Elementary school parents use it to coordinate class events. Small business owners use it to talk to their customers. The sticker culture, the Timeline, the Official Accounts. All of it grew out of watching how real people actually wanted to use the app, not from a product roadmap drawn up in a boardroom.
Born in 2011 as a response to a real communications crisis, not a startup pitch
Designed to work on low-bandwidth connections from the very first version
Sticker library built by independent creators, not just an in-house design team
Official Accounts let local businesses and city offices talk directly to residents
LINE Pay integrated so you never need to leave the app to split a bill
Keep feature saves important messages so they do not disappear in long threads
In touch
Download LINE and start talking today
Get LINE FreeSetting up LINE takes about five minutes if you have your phone number ready. The process is the same whether you are on an iPhone or an Android device, with a few small differences in where to find certain settings. This guide walks through each step in order, including the parts that sometimes cause confusion.
Read more →A family LINE group is one of the most common uses of the app in Japan. Done well, it becomes a quiet daily thread where people share small things: a photo of lunch, a note about the weekend, a reminder about a birthday. Done badly, it becomes a source of notification anxiety. The difference usually comes down to a few small setup decisions.
Read more →LINE Pay is built into the LINE app and works at thousands of shops across Japan. Setting it up takes about ten minutes if you have your bank's internet banking details ready. This guide covers the setup process, how to pay in shops, and how to send money to friends through the app.
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