comm

~ the obit ~

comm was DeNA's free calling and messaging app, released on 23 October 2012 for iOS and Android in 204 countries and regions at once. The pitch was audio quality. LINE and KakaoTalk already owned the Japanese messaging market by then, so DeNA went after the one thing a gaming company with real server engineering could claim: calls that sounded better than the competition's. Everything else was familiar: stickers and group chats, on top of a contact list built off your phone book.

It worked, briefly and enormously. comm took the number one spot on the Japanese App Store's free chart on its first day of release, and the top of Google Play's new-and-popular free ranking by the 31st. DeNA said it wanted ten million downloads in Japan by the middle of 2013 and tens of millions worldwide. By the last day of December 2012, ten weeks after release, five million people had registered.

Then it stopped. On 26 June 2013 Nikkei Business reported that DeNA had decided to shrink comm's operation to a few people, down from a peak of around seventy assigned to building and running it, and that promotional spending aimed at winning new members would end. Eight months after the number one slot, the product still existed and the project did not. It stayed in the app stores, logged-in and functional, for nearly twenty-two more months before DeNA turned it off at 15:00 on 21 April 2015.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the first ten weeks ~

The thing that gets lost in a failure this tidy is how good the opening looked. Five million registrations in ten weeks is not a soft launch, and comm was built by a young team: DeNA's president told the press that hires in their first three years out of university had done most of the work, and the head of the internal comm strategy unit was himself a third-year employee. A company known for mobile gaming handed a strategic product to its newest engineers and they put it at the top of the chart in a day.

DeNA never publicly revised the ten million target.

~ the team that shrank ~

Seventy people to a handful is the number that explains the next two years. comm did not get shut down in June 2013; it got unstaffed. DeNA kept the servers up, kept the app downloadable, and stopped doing anything that would bring a new person in. That is a strange state for a messaging app, because a messaging app with no new members is a closed room. Whoever was already inside could keep talking to whoever was already inside, and that was the whole future of the product.

The room stayed open until April 2015. Nobody has published a figure for how many of those five million registrations were still active on the last day, and the company that would know never said.

~ what the terms said ~

comm's other problem arrived in its launch week. The terms of service, as reported at the time, allowed DeNA to copy users' personal information and the contents of their messages, and to pass that material to third parties. Searching a registered user's name could surface their profile to a stranger. For an app whose entire function was private conversation, this was the worst possible first impression, and the Japanese press made sure it was the first impression. DeNA improved the terms afterward. The reputation did not improve with them.

None of this was visible from where I was. In Turkey in 2012 the messenger argument was WhatsApp against BlackBerry Messenger, with Viber taking the people who wanted free calls, and the Asian apps were things I read about in tech coverage rather than things anyone handed me a phone number for. LINE's hold on Japan and this third app trying to get underneath it were a market I could describe and had no access to. comm shipped in 204 countries and regions and Turkey was one of them, which makes the distance a licensing fact rather than a geographic one: it was there, on the store, in a language I could not read, solving a problem WhatsApp had already solved for everyone I knew.

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