Before I got an Android device and Kimchi Man helped me install my very first Korean app, I was stuck with texting him in a very annoying way. You see, for some reason SMSing from Europe to Korea doesn’t work. I had contacted all the service providers, and they assured me they have contracts with Korean companies and that it should work.

Should, but doesn’t. It probably has something to do with character encoding, our SMS is optimized for Latin alphabet, Korean for Hangul. But then again Kimchi Man can send SMS to me just fine.

Anyway, Kimchi Man found a way around this, he let me log in to his father’s mobile carrier’s service of sending SMS for free inside Korea. So I would log in with my phone that could barely render webpages and it would take me around 10 – 15 minutes to type and send the text. I know it’s crazy when I think this didn’t stop me from texting him dozens of messages a day, but in my defense – I was in love!

My love for him hasn’t changed, but what has changed is that I got a new phone and could finally use texting and calling apps. Instead of 10 minutes, it takes 10 seconds. And these apps are really cute too.

The app we use is called MyPeople, but since we started this blog I had the impression that everyone else uses KakaoTalk – we got quite a few questions that start with “I talk to this Korean guy in KakaoTalk and…” and I even got private messages asking if I would share my KakaoTalk ID (I would, but I don’t have one). So I decided to write a post reviewing and comparing four most popular Korean apps. But before I did that, I set up a survey because I wanted to check if KakaoTalk really was so much dominant. Let’s find out.

89 people took the survey and we are really grateful to all of them. 26% of participants were from the United States, 11% from South Korea, 6% Singapore, and 4% from United Kingdom, Philippines, Germany, Australia, and Malaysia each, with 34 countries in total.

Here are their answers.

It is interesting that 12% neither have a Korean friend nor are in relationship with a Korean person, and yet still some of them used Koreans apps to text. It would be interesting to learn how they got to use a Korean app. Also, 25% have both Korean friend and are in relationship with a Korean and don’t use any of these apps.

And now, the big question, which instant messaging application do the participants use.

So, my impression was correct, KakaoTalk is indeed dominant. Among those that selected the option “Other” non-Korean apps Viber and WhatsApp were the most common. Also, some people put in Facebook, e-mail, mobile phone, etc. as their answer, but as none of those is really an instant messaging app we counted their answers as “None”.

Next, we were wondering which feature is the most important to people. We wanted to take this into account when reviewing the apps later.

And lastly, which devices and operating systems are those apps mostly used on?

Those were all the questions asked in the survey. Some answers were expected – KakaoTalk took the app crown, but I was surprised about the last one – I really expected most people would be using iPhone. What was your impression? Did you expect KakaoTalk and Android to win?