LINE VOOM

~ the goodbye ~

LINE is the messenger that won Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and for a while Indonesia, after the 2011 earthquake made phone networks unreliable and data networks the fallback. In Turkey none of this happened. We went from MSN to WhatsApp with no local layer in between, so LINE for me is a company I read about and not an app I ever opened. What follows is the story of a feature inside an app most of a country uses every day and almost nobody outside that region has touched.

The feature started life as Timeline, a friends-only post feed glued to the side of the messenger, essentially what Facebook's wall would be if it had been built by a chat app. On 25 November 2021 LINE replaced it with VOOM on Android, with iOS following on 13 December. The concept was stated as "Connect to fun". Visibility flipped from friends-only to follows, a recommendation engine arrived in a "For you" tab, and the content model changed from your acquaintances posting lunch to strangers posting short vertical video. It was late 2021 and every large platform was shipping the same thing that quarter.

VOOM never found a reason to exist. It had one enormous advantage, a permanent tab in an app that more than ninety million people in Japan open every month, and it still could not build a watch habit or any creator worth following. Distribution turned out not to substitute for demand. By 16 September 2025 LY Corporation had started swapping the VOOM tab out for a Shopping tab, a year before it got around to saying the service was over.

The announcement came on 15 July 2026 and the service ended around 11am on 30 September. Posting stopped and other people's posts went unviewable, and five years of uploads became unrecoverable rather than exportable. The Story feature went with it, along with the follow-and-follower graph that had only ever existed inside VOOM.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a shutdown people celebrated ~

Most service closures produce a wave of nostalgia posts. This one produced thank-you notes. Japanese reaction to the July announcement ran heavily toward relief, with "サ終本当にありがとう", thank you so much for ending the service, as a representative sentiment. Parents were the loudest group. VOOM sat one tap away inside the messenger their children used to talk to them, serving an endless algorithmic video feed with no separate app a parent could delete. A fair number of families had restricted LINE itself to get around it.

There was a quieter minority who pointed out that Timeline, in its original form, had held a decade of birthday messages and group photos, and that VOOM had buried all of it under recommendations from strangers before deleting the lot.

~ what LY was actually doing ~

The stated reason was a review of how the service was provided. The pattern underneath it is easier to read. LY Corporation, the merged Yahoo Japan and LINE entity, has spent several years pulling out of entertainment and pushing the messenger back toward commerce and daily utility. LINE Live closed. The GYAO! catalog was routed into VOOM in 2023, VOOM was scaled back the following year, and the tab that replaced it sells things.

A super-app that tries to be a television channel competes with television channels. A super-app that tries to be a shopping mall competes with shopping malls, and it already knows who all of your friends are.

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