[HN Gopher] I found a 1-click exploit in South Korea's biggest m...
___________________________________________________________________
I found a 1-click exploit in South Korea's biggest mobile chat app
Author : stulle123
Score : 148 points
Date : 2024-06-24 15:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (stulle123.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (stulle123.github.io)
| Shank wrote:
| > However, we didn't receive any reward as only Koreans are
| eligible to receive a bounty
|
| Talk about discouragement for research. KakaoTalk is huge -- the
| equivalent of WhatsApp for EU people or LINE in Japan. Many
| foreigners learning Korean use KakaoTalk to chat, so this
| definitely affects people outside of the country. Restricting
| payment to just Koreans is objectively a terrible decision, as it
| endangers their users for no discernible reason.
| snaeker58 wrote:
| I can see some executive being sneaky and saving 0.0001% of all
| their expenses.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| KakaoTalk is huge in the sense that it's almost impossible to
| find any Korean person, teenager or adult, who doesn't use it
| daily.
|
| It'd be like finding a person who doesn't use electricity.
| its-summertime wrote:
| > KakaoTalk is huge -- the equivalent of WhatsApp for EU people
| or LINE in Japan
|
| I feel that doesn't really describe it well, one should look
| into the respective product listings for these companies to get
| a proper idea of the scope of potential damages that could
| occur.
|
| https://www.kakaocorp.com/page/service/service
|
| https://line.me/en/#allProduct
|
| WhatsApp is only just getting into the complete ecosystem side
| of things with Meta Pay. Google as a company is probably more
| representative of scale
|
| https://about.google/products/#all-products
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That kind of stuff is what Musk chases with X, by the way.
| It's his once-a-lifetime bet, even bigger than SpaceX and
| Tesla _combined_ - succeed in delivering a "one for
| everything" Asian-style app to the Western ecosystem and you
| have a money printer of unfathomable power. Had he not
| completely destroyed all trust in the brand Twitter/X, I'd
| think he'd have a serious chance of achieving that goal.
|
| The _really_ interesting thing, IMO, is where Facebook went
| off the rails. They have the moat with literal billions of
| people using their apps already, they got real names,
| addresses, location data, in some cases (legacy Whatsapp
| users, people who ever ran ads) payment data, Facebook
| already has sort of a "shop" solution with Marketplace...
| but they don't seem to be attractive at all, or doing
| anything innovative. It's all Metaverse or whatever.
| its-summertime wrote:
| Meta was probably against pushing super hard to avoid the
| kind of situation that X is now in.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| How do you mean? The situation with X seems mostly to do
| with marketing (people not liking the owner & his
| behavior) and bots, with maybe a little bit of
| instability thrown in. As noted elsewhere in the thread,
| Facebook already has experience with a bunch of different
| types of services-- from the games they used to host, to
| Marketplace mentioned elsewhere in the thread, to event
| management rivaling Meetup & Eventbrite, and even a
| dating app. X talks about being an "everything app," but
| they really just have posts (with media) and that's their
| only feature to date. Facebook does a lot more. So I
| don't see how pushing harder on non-social features would
| make them any more like X is right now.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It's not just Facebook that "failed" to build the so-called
| superapps, none of Western private chat apps company had
| done it, let alone social media, or _any_ app from anyone
| with strong C-class leadership and lean bureaucracy for
| that matter.
|
| The way those "superapps" grow the "apps" is middle
| management doing his personal projects on corporate
| microservice infrastructure and IC hire upper management
| succumbing to bureaucracy. Thanks to bureaucracy, some
| brand integrity is maintained, and that kind of makes money
| anyway as company side gigs. After it goes garbage in and
| out of translation, the whole company doings end up on BBC
| as Oriental wonder superapps.
|
| SoftBank subsidiary owns LINE. So do Masayoshi Son even
| know how many individual sub-apps there are or who's under
| who running what? I highly doubt it. And I also highly
| doubt a control freak like Musk can even bear that kind of
| situation; he'd personally dragged out a server rack out of
| an NTT datacenter without going through rituals and
| ceremonies, which made a web article by itself. None of
| superapp operators seem to have that kind of boss.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| the fact of the matter is that there are massive
| differences in consumer opinion. Western markets prefer
| specialist companies that do one thing really well,
| whereas in East Asia people often prefer trusted
| conglomerates.
|
| As a general example, department stores are much
| healthier in Japan and Korea, whereas in the US they were
| hollowed out by specialty clothing retailers, specialty
| makeup retailers, etc. and then finally kicked over by
| online shopping.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > None of superapp operators seem to have that kind of
| boss.
|
| But they also don't have the shareholder/activist
| investor pressure that Western companies face.
|
| To achieve "superapp" size, you need to have either a
| strong leader personality driving the push by their sheer
| will and vision and especially with enough
| authority/financial power to overrule investors - people
| like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg
| - or you need to be one of the Asian ultra-
| conglomerate/"chaebol" companies that have absurd amounts
| of money flowing through them that enterprising middle
| managers can divert.
|
| Unfortunately, with the exception of the visionaries I
| mentioned, corporate America and Europe just doesn't have
| many company founders with both clear visions and a
| backbone, and there's (partially "thanks" to de-
| conglomerisation trends of the 90s and later like with
| German giant Siemens) nothing at all left that comes even
| close to the diversification of revenue that Samsung has.
| snaeker58 wrote:
| Crazy that only Koreans are eligible for bounty rewards. Someone
| is going to put their morals aside in the future and their
| customers are going to be the victims. Also I'm pretty sure a
| large part of government officials in Korea use KakaoTalk?
|
| But hey at least they actually took action...
| ffhhj wrote:
| Taxes?
| laz wrote:
| Non-Koreans who live and work in South Korea pay South Korean
| taxes
| nextworddev wrote:
| Don't think most Digital Nomads in South Korea pay any
| South Korean taxes
| ddoolin wrote:
| There are many non-Korean non-digital-nomads living and
| working in South Korea who do pay taxes. Millions,
| actually. South Korea has a very large international
| residency.
| localfirst wrote:
| It is rather strange isn't it? After all it seems like author
| of the article isn't Korean, would benefit KakaoTalk to just
| pay a bounty to him.
|
| KakaoTalk is huge. Can't do anything in Korea without it.
| siva7 wrote:
| Reminds me how the telegram founder boasted how talented his team
| is as only one developer was responsible for writing the mobile
| client. Turns out that client was riddled with bugs that
| displayed messages to the wrong user. A mobile chat app shouldn't
| be developed with the mantra "move fast and break things" yet
| this is the natural product result of all-in-one apps like kakao.
| inquirerGeneral wrote:
| Was this a decade ago? I've been following Telegram development
| for over five years and never heard of this
| sunaookami wrote:
| Telegram user since 2014 and never heard of it. This
| definitely never happened.
| bluesign wrote:
| To be fair to telegram; similar things happened to many big
| names: facebook, google, apple etc
| lxgr wrote:
| Delivering messages to the wrong recipient!? Examples,
| please!
| webappguy wrote:
| Curious to know more. Will search but if anyone finds
| anything
| wiseowise wrote:
| How could client deliver messages to the wrong recipient?
| Why would client have messages for user outside of the one
| logged in anyway?
| ascar wrote:
| Seems like a rather easy thing to go wrong in the client,
| no?
|
| User sends message via client. Client fumbles the
| recipient id. Message ends up at the wrong recipient.
|
| Examples: incorrect recipient ID attached to contact in
| list where users selects recipient. Buggy selection of
| multiple targets in the selection UI due to incorrect
| touch event handling. Incorrect deletion of previously
| selected and then deselected recipient from recipient
| array of multitarget message. Or if working low level
| even a good old off by one error and reading out of
| bounds data for the recipient list (though that one
| hopefully should trigger a faulty send request due to
| other stuff no longer matching). There is endless
| examples.
|
| The server can't really safeguard against the client
| providing a legitimate send request even though the user
| intended to send it to another recipient.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27950763
|
| Yeah, I don't know how they manage to get bugs like that,
| but it's happened
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Do you mean something like the mobile app had multiple user
| accounts added to it, and it displayed messages for one account
| in the other account? Otherwise it seems more like a server bug
| than a client bug?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Chat apps are hard, this doesn't strike me as a proof of bad
| quality as many competitors had such bugs.
|
| And Telegram has been so far the most reliable, feature full
| and easy to use chat app I have had to use.
| lxgr wrote:
| Which other chat app has displayed messages to the wrong
| users? That seems like one of the worst things a chat app
| could possibly ever do.
| asddubs wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27950763
| EGreg wrote:
| Wow, touche
|
| And in an Apples-to-Apples comparison, WhatsApp fared far
| worse than Telegram on privacy, and not to mention its
| parent company.
|
| The only benefit I can think of WhatsApp has is claiming
| to be encrypted _by default_. So I dont need to press an
| extra button. I just have to take their word for it.
| lxgr wrote:
| > And in an Apples-to-Apples comparison, WhatsApp fared
| far worse than Telegram on privacy, and not to mention
| its parent company.
|
| I'd like to see that comparison. Considering that
| WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, and Telegram
| persistently stores almost all of their users' messages
| on their backend in a way that lets them read them, I
| find that very hard to believe.
|
| > So I dont need to press an extra button.
|
| Nobody presses an extra button, especially not one that
| opts you out of multi-device support.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Whatsapp is not open source and facebook was part of the
| PRISM program.
|
| I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to actually
| be e2e encrypted.
|
| Espacially since Zuckerberg has many years of poor track
| record for privacy, and made the famous quote "they trust
| me the dumb fucks"
| EGreg wrote:
| Exactly! Good points. Facebook's been caught spying on
| you with audio, video, contacts, cameras you name it.
| What makes the true believers so sure their WhatsApp
| chats are really E2E encrypted and FB cant decrypt them
| and isnt scanning at the edge? LMAO
| lxgr wrote:
| > Facebook's been caught spying on you with audio, video,
| contacts, cameras you name it.
|
| For contacts: I have no expectations of any contact
| privacy on WhatsApp. It's known and documented [1] that
| they upload your entire phone book for contact matching.
| Private set intersection would be better, but I don't see
| anything sneaky going on.
|
| Audio, video, cameras: What are you referring to?
|
| > What makes the true believers so sure their WhatsApp
| chats are really E2E encrypted and FB cant decrypt them
| and isnt scanning at the edge?
|
| The amount of scrutiny they're under from security
| researchers worldwide, and the fact that many governments
| are currently throwing a fit about not being able to gain
| access to the data either.
|
| [1] https://faq.whatsapp.com/1191526044909364
| lxgr wrote:
| So we have one app that claims to be end-to-end encrypted
| and is under intense scrutiny of security researchers
| across the world, and another one that's provably not
| encrypted and stores everything server side. Which one
| should I use?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Also whatsapp: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatsapp/comments/1
| 8eikrz/whatsapp_...
|
| Discord: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/18dfm
| iw/discord...
| lxgr wrote:
| That's a single point of anecdata from Reddit, as far as
| I can tell at least for the WhatsApp one.
|
| The Signal one somebody has posted in the adjacent thread
| was definitely real and horrible though:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27950763
|
| The fact that at least two heavily-used messengers got
| one of the most essential things in instant messaging
| wrong is nightmare fuel I didn't need to have in my life
| :(
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| We just had the xz crisis and that surprises you?
|
| IT is just a series of security breaches.
| lxgr wrote:
| Don't shift goal posts, please. A supply chain attack and
| a service sending private messages to the wrong recipient
| are very different issues.
| gsa wrote:
| Google:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/26/google-
| pr...
| lxgr wrote:
| Wow, I'm truly baffled! Is this a rite of passage for
| instant messenger developers!?
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Delivering messages to the intended recipients (and no one
| else) is the single fundamental purpose of chat. If many chat
| apps have failed at this, then many chat apps have sucked.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yes, but in that case, no single chat app ever conceived
| match your criteria. They all had some kind of similar
| major bug at some point. Even the big names.
| rvba wrote:
| "Designed by committee" software can have terrible bugs too.
| qwertox wrote:
| "We also release our tooling so that fellow security researchers
| can dig into KakaoTalk's broad attack surface to find more bugs."
| I think this would be illegal in Germany.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| Why? How is that relevant? Isnt it well established that open
| source security research is the number one way to have a secure
| app/ecosystem? Why should tooling be kept secret when another
| team can potentially find more exploits using these/similar
| techniques?
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > The sole possession of hardware, software or other tools
| that can be used to commit cybercrime can constitute a
| criminal offence according to Sec. 202c of the German
| Criminal Code.
|
| https://iclg.com/practice-areas/cybersecurity-laws-and-
| regul...
| mlinhares wrote:
| We'd all be arrested in Germany then as we all have
| computers with compilers installed on them.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Well that is kinda the point of these vague laws. Just
| like they eventually nailed Al Capone with taxes in the
| US - if you can't hit someone directly, you can hit them
| with the "three felonies a day".
|
| I'm German... our politicians, at least most of them are
| a bunch of pathologically technologically incompetent
| buffoons. A lot of that was masked during the Merkel era
| because she herself was a literal nuclear physics
| doctorate, but now that she's gone, it's painfully
| obvious what's going on.
| yorwba wrote:
| Except SS202c StGB https://www.gesetze-im-
| internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st... isn't actually
| vague. The simple reason it doesn't outlaw compilers is
| that compilers aren't built for the _purpose_ of giving
| unauthorized access to other people 's data, even though
| they can help achieve that aim.
|
| It's similar to how weapons designed to be used against
| people are regulated differently from tools that merely
| happen to be usable as weapons.
|
| In the concrete case of sharing tools to explore the
| attack surface of KakaoTalk, this is not a crime under
| SS202c StGB as long as you do not _intend_ them to be
| used to hack accounts you do not own.
| tptacek wrote:
| That is not in fact well-established at all, though as
| someone who came up through vuln research I expect we have
| similar takes on the public policy of vuln and exploit
| disclosure.
| james_dev_123 wrote:
| Fun fact: western ride sharing apps don't work in South Korea,
| and this company also makes the leading rideshare app in the
| country.
|
| I was forced to make an account on the mobile chat app in order
| to log into their rideshare app, on a recent trip to Seoul. The
| UX was not great... not to mention that it was mostly in Korean.
| I had a lot of trouble. They didn't strike me as the most
| professional operation..
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| It's an everything app suite with single sign-on:
|
| KakaoTalk, KakaoTaxi, KakaoBank even (bank obvs not for
| foreigners without local ID numbers).
|
| The Kakao Metro map app is the best of its class too.
| laz wrote:
| When did Kakao Bank start offering accounts to foreigners
| with ARCs? Last I checked it did not.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Some foreigners claim they have KakaoBank accounts, but
| they may be confusing them with KakaoPay accounts, or maybe
| the account is in their spouse's name or whatever.
|
| Suffice it to say: for foreigners without a Korean ID
| number it's a definite no and with a Korean ID it's a
| likely no.
|
| And good news: they're not called "ARCs" anymore. No more
| "Alien Registration Card" extraterrestrial stigma. Now it's
| just the regular stigma.
| BlockerBrews wrote:
| This is correct. I live in South Korea and I've never
| heard of any foreigners with kakao bank accounts. That
| was never offered as far as I know.
| alxlu wrote:
| Uber works in Seoul
| laz wrote:
| Uber works in S Korea now.
|
| It also accepts non-Korean credit cards, while most online apps
| in South Korea do not.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| One thing that surprised me about SK is that they have so many
| local alternatives for tech products that I thought were
| global. And the global/US version has almost no market
| penetration. An example of this was Google, at least when I
| visited in early 2015.
| localfirst wrote:
| It's great that American software monopolies do not have
| access to Korean data and that Korean companies can create
| jobs hiring Koreans and add to the GDP. ALL sovereign
| countries should practice sovereign software and safeguard
| PII of its citizens
|
| It's rather inconvenient for non-Koreans but you were never
| the intended audience nor is there much care for foreigners
| these days-there is growing hostility towards foreign
| tourists who have flocked to Japan and Korea in recent years.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| I don't know about SK's privacy laws, but wouldn't a
| country's government have more power to tap into the data
| of local companies?
| dingnuts wrote:
| yes, and they also have the power to tell multinationals
| where they are allowed, geographically, to store the
| locals' data.
|
| the grandparent has invented a fake problem (data
| regionalization, as though it cannot be addressed with
| regulation) and has conflated a nationalist-socialist
| desire to replace a foreign private enterprise with a
| nationalized public one. it's nationalist because it
| assumes that the nation needs to own it, and socialist
| because at the national level a public solution is
| proposed.
|
| the solution, in turn, doesn't actually solve the
| regionalization problem unless the state organization
| running the nationalized ride share app is required
| through further legislation to keep the data local -- the
| same legislation that would be needed to regulate private
| entities, except now it's the government regulating
| itself since the public national ride share app is
| operated and owned by the government, and is now open to
| all the problems of corruption that plague every command
| economy.
|
| But by all means, be more like North Korea, South Korea.
| Just nationalize everything. You don't want American
| influence. Those American monopolies and American dollars
| have really made you worse off in the last seventy years.
| /s
| akdev1l wrote:
| > ALL sovereign countries should practice sovereign
| software and safeguard PII of its citizens
|
| Most countries are incapable of this and when they do try
| they do a worse job.
|
| My government has a website that allows you to fetch a
| person's voting centre by knowing their ID number. Our ID
| numbers are sequential. Therefore you can use that website
| to get approximate location for literally everyone.
|
| My government also has a website to request passports
| online. I was playing with it and it turns out they have an
| open GraphQL endpoint that lets me query billing
| transactions for _everyone_.
|
| But sure the software was made in my country.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| > Therefore you can use that website to get approximate
| location for literally everyone.
|
| Approximate address, surely. Addresses are ... usually
| not very secret in the first place, though? It'd be
| absolutely fascinating if your government not only
| tracked everyone's _location_ but assigned their voting
| center by current location, but, well,
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| > It'd be absolutely fascinating if your government not
| only tracked everyone's location but assigned their
| voting center by current location, but, well,
|
| That's exactly what happens in Turkiye. I assume GP is
| there.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| IMHO That's where the software model could change if more
| countries gave a serious shake at managing national
| services.
|
| As you point out it's hard and few can do it, so getting
| more common open source platforms would be a natural
| evolution. Then relying on global providers that act as a
| service developer instead of a service owner would still
| be a huge difference.
| devbent wrote:
| > Therefore you can use that website to get approximate
| location for literally everyone.
|
| In America, before the Internet took off, every year
| everyone would get a book called the "white pages" that
| had the name, address, and phone number, of everyone who
| lived in their city.
|
| The American view of privacy is that "openness makes for
| a civil society".
|
| Although one can argue that hasn't been working out well
| for us lately ..
|
| Likewise, marriages are publicly recorded and accessible
| online, as are all property purchases, births, deaths,
| and even property tax payments.
|
| Though for some reason we consider income taxes to be
| super secret. Everything else is public, but not those!
| (How much cash someone put down to buy a house? Public.
| How much money that person makes? Not public. How much
| money everyone donates to politicians? Public.)
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| As an American in the software industry, I whole-heartedly
| agree.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Why would we think that every country blocking out foreign
| companies would result in better software being written for
| consumers in that country?
|
| I think some tiny amount of protectionism can be necessary
| to get a domestic industry started, when it is important
| for reasons beyond giving access to the best products like
| national security. Especially in edge cases like competing
| with foreign companies with the backing of their state
| government or an international market that has degenerated
| to a monopoly. But ultimately free trade makes better
| products and international consumers richer and is the
| desired end goal, not every nation rewriting the same tech
| stack and providing local flavors of software solving
| similar problems.
| lmz wrote:
| > not every nation rewriting the same tech stack and
| providing local flavors of software solving similar
| problems.
|
| Why not? Isn't Diversity good? Wouldn't it be nice to
| have multiple colors, implementations of things rather
| than the monopolistic (and probably American) beige?
| kcb wrote:
| You would be doing the opposite of that. Creating 100
| monopolies.
| lmz wrote:
| Better a hundred of them than only one or two.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| Sovereign software would break the open Internet as it
| exists today. A lot more work needs to be done on open
| protocols before interoperation would work nearly as well
| as the products we have today.
|
| Not to mention the colossal waste of effort in engineering
| hours, the disparity in quality between rich and poor
| countries, etc.
|
| Reuse is good. I would rather see open data and open
| protocols too, but look at Cambridge analytica, a scandal
| that was a direct consequence of giving people control over
| their data!
| setopt wrote:
| I lived in South Korea some years ago, and it was interesting
| how they had a separate ecosystem of apps and services.
| "KakaoTalk" and "Naver" had approximately the roles that
| WhatsApp/Meta and Google have in the West.
|
| I think it's great how these managed to thrive, despite
| increased competition from multinational companies. In many
| other countries, local tech companies seem to have become
| nearly irrelevant over the past decade, which is a sad to see.
| Quinner wrote:
| It's the result of protectionist government policy. The
| policies are protectionist not just against foreign entry but
| also against entry of new products into the market. The
| government picks technology winners. Unsurprisingly, the
| government doesn't do a great job of this. Infamously it
| mandated usage of ActiveX and Internet Explorer for banking
| long after ActiveX had its time in the sun (the government
| made this the mandate in 1996 and didn't reform it until
| 2021!)
| setopt wrote:
| When you mention it, as a Linux user at the time I
| struggled a lot with the ActiveX thing... Eventually I
| think I gave up. I had no idea that stuff was government-
| mandated.
| bhc wrote:
| In case of Kakao Taxi vs Uber, it was Uber's unwillingness
| to work with existing taxi operators that killed any chance
| Uber had in the Korean market. Kakao (at least until they
| became dominant) acted more like an agent that sends
| additional customers to existing independent taxi drivers
| while Uber kept trying to find legal loopholes to bypass
| the taxi licensing system. S Korea is a civil law country,
| and its courts have no patience for actors whose entire
| legal strategy is to subvert the intent of the laws, and
| that was the end for Uber there.
| gleenn wrote:
| To be accurate, Uber didn't abide by laws in most
| countries it went up against. It was a little slimy but
| also the taxi systems of most places were very
| entrenched. I remember never enjoying riding taxis in San
| Francisco for years, the cars were gross and the drivers
| were grumpy and generally shady about having their
| "credit card readers being broken" so they didn't have to
| pay the fees. Uber and a bunch of companies did and end
| run around those very politically entrenched systems and
| I certainly am happy to have clean, friendly, safe,
| modern rides with good tech where reviews keep things in
| line and payment is easy and I can share my location
| easily and know I'm going to end up at the right place
| way better.
| Prickle wrote:
| They don't have international competition.
|
| The Korean government explicitly chooses companies for these
| things. And those companies, Chaebols like Samsung, choose
| the laws.
|
| If these Korean apps were so good, you would expect them to
| penetrate foreign markets. But they don't.
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/06/dumb-telecom-industry-
| ba...
|
| Just like how British car companies collapsed when foreign
| competition entered the market on equal footing, these
| companies will disintegrate if forced to compete.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/world/la-xpm-2010-dec-01-la-fg-
| south...
| Algemarin wrote:
| > The UX was not great... not to mention that it was mostly in
| Korean. I had a lot of trouble. They didn't strike me as the
| most professional operation..
|
| What does the seemingly very common-sense fact that a South
| Korean app was "mostly"(?) in Korean have to do with the UX or
| with it not being "professional"?
|
| What language were you expecting the South Korean app to be in,
| French?
| jszymborski wrote:
| Surely there's no obligation to internationalize your app,
| but taxis are commonly used by tourists so you'd imagine it
| would be a good business decision.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| multi language support is pretty standard in many popular
| apps. it's not even that hard.
|
| Imagine supporting the most common language in the world.
| CRAZY right?
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/supporting-m.
| ..
| Algemarin wrote:
| > Imagine supporting the 2nd most popular language in the
| world. CRAZY right?
|
| Why are you fixating on supporting the 2nd most popular
| language, shouldn't it support the 1st most popular
| language first? Or why not jump straight to the 3rd?
| lurking_swe wrote:
| i meant most common, was an error on my part.
|
| also, if you add internationalization support for 1
| language in your app, it's trivial (these days) to add
| other languages. My point is they should just add support
| for other languages, like chinese, japanese, english,
| etc.
|
| More users = more money?
| permanent wrote:
| just so u know, kakaotalk does exist in multiple
| languages. feels like this whole thread is based on a
| false assumption
|
| >Kakaotalk is in English, French, German, Indonesian,
| Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian,
| Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Thai, Traditional Chinese,
| Turkish, Vietnamese
| (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kakaotalk/id362057947)
| lurking_swe wrote:
| happy to be proven wrong! Cheers
| theultdev wrote:
| Have you actually used it?
|
| I used it earlier this year in Korea, although it did
| have a hard to get to setting to change your language,
| many many things were still in Korean.
|
| It is very difficult to navigate, but I asked for help
| and a native was able to figure it out.
|
| Still more usable than Google Maps though, which will
| only give you a not so good train schedule. No walking
| directions at all.
| sWW26 wrote:
| I think your talking about a different app, KakaoMap,
| which you're right isn't totally localised. KakaoTalk is
| though.
| devbent wrote:
| I've seen tons of American made apps from large companies
| that show bits of English here and there when switched to
| another language.
|
| Localization is _hard_ , even for companies that spend a
| lot of time and effort on it.
|
| It isn't just string replacements!
| TillE wrote:
| Surely not the most popular language among tourists in
| South Korea, who would be mostly from Japan, China, etc.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| that's a fair point. in that case, why not support
| chinese, japanese, etc?
|
| my point is it seems like good business sense. strange
| they haven't done this.
| voxic11 wrote:
| Uber, an American rideshare company, supports a large number
| of languages including Korean.
| astonex wrote:
| Because Uber operates is many countries.
| Xeamek wrote:
| As others already mentioned, Uber does work in SKorea (or at
| least Seoul), altough it's not _really_ an uber, afaik its just
| a proxy for kakaotaxi while using Uber 's interface
| BlockerBrews wrote:
| Korea uses KakaoT as a ride hailing app. But all it does is
| hail taxis. Uber in Korea just hails Uber branded taxis. I
| have no idea if they are officially affiliated with Uber or
| not.
| permanent wrote:
| Kakaotalk is in English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian,
| Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese,
| Spanish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Vietnamese
| (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kakaotalk/id362057947)
| system2 wrote:
| LOL Only Koreans are eligible for reward. They deserve to be
| destroyed by hackers at this point.
| rvba wrote:
| Encourages to sell the bugs
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(page generated 2024-06-25 23:00 UTC)