New Mobile Messaging App joyn Launches in Korea

Messaging apps like Kakao Talk and Naver Line have been mega hits with mobile users around the world. Naver Line is a leading player with over 80 million subscribers globally. Kakao Talk revealed this week that it reached the 70 million user milestone worldwide!

Can another messaging service also win the hearts of mobile users like Kakao and Line have?

Three of the nation’s largest telecom companies SK Telecom, KT and LG U+ think they have a service that will please smartphone users. The three companies announced on Christmas Day that they are jointly launching a new communication platform called joyn. Joyn integrates messaging, voice and data services and offers cool new features.

The joyn app is currently only available on Android phones, but an iOS version is planned for release in early 2013 as well. With this new service, you can send text messages, make mVoIP (mobile Voice over IP) voice calls and send video and images to another person even in the middle of a phone call. All of these features are available for free and joyn offers a file transfer capacity of 100 megabytes. This large capacity will be great for when you want to send your friends all the photos from a party or a birthday video message to your mom without worrying about the file size.

Joyn is launched by SK Telecom, KT and LG U+ in Korea, but it was developed by 220 carriers and smartphone producers around the world under the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA)’s “joyn” brand. GSMA is an international association that operates in more than 220 countries. Germany and Spain have already launched joyn and Korea is the third country in the world to do so.

We were pleased to find out that you can use joyn to send chat messages to people even if they don’t have the app installed on their phones. Your message will appear as a traditional text message on that person’s phone, but appear as part of a chat conversation on your own screen. Don’t worry, when a non-joyn user sends you a text, the joyn app will still indicate clearly on your phone that it was received as such. Later, if that person installs joyn, your future conversations can all be stored as a chat conversation.