Download APK LINE Feature Guide, Previous Version Differences & Review

I first opened LINE on a quiet morning while my phone was still charging, and I gave it a week of ordinary use before forming any opinion. The first screen asked for little, the main tabs sat where my thumb expected them, and the chat list loaded fast enough that I never had to wait for it. That calm start matters, because a messaging app lives or dies on the hundred small moments when you open it to send one quick message and then put the phone away again.

LINE is a messaging app from LY Corporation that grew out of Japan and spread across Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and much of East Asia, where it works as a daily hub rather than a single-purpose chat tool. People use it for one-to-one chats, family group chats, voice calls, video calls, stickers, photo albums, notes, and a social feed, all inside one app. If you only know it as a chat app, the first surprise is how much of daily life it tries to cover, and the second surprise is how little of that coverage gets in the way of sending a simple message.

This guide answers the title directly. You will get the real feature list, what changed between older builds and the current one, how to set the app up without tripping over its settings, an honest comparison with WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal, and a verdict that depends on who you are. I tested the current build on a mid-range Android phone over several weeks, in short daily sessions, and everything below comes from that use plus the documented behaviour of the app.

What LINE Actually Does on Android in 2026

At its core, LINE is a phone-number and account based messenger. You register with a phone number or an email-linked account, add friends by QR code, phone number, ID search or shaking phones together in the same room, and then you chat. Messages support text, photos, videos, voice notes, files, location sharing, contact cards and polls. Read receipts show when a message has been seen, and you can unsend a message within 24 hours if you sent it to the wrong chat or spotted a typo a second too late.

The app organises itself around five tabs at the bottom of the screen: Home, Chats, VOOM, Calls and Wallet in recent builds, with the exact order and labels shifting a little between regions. Home holds your profile, friends list, services and settings. Chats is where you spend most of your time. VOOM is the short-video and post feed that replaced the old Timeline. Calls gathers your call history and a keypad. Wallet gathers payment and coupon services where they are available, and in regions where LINE Pay is not offered that tab stays quiet and mostly out of the way.

What makes LINE different from a plain messenger is the way chats, calls and social features share one contact list. A friend you chat with is the same person you call, the same person whose photos sit in a shared album, and the same person who can join a group call from the same thread. That sounds obvious, but plenty of apps split those jobs across separate screens and separate friend lists. LINE keeps them together, and after a week that togetherness is what makes the app feel like one tool instead of five tools sharing an icon.

Who LINE suits best, and who should look elsewhere

LINE suits people whose friends and family already use it, which is the honest first test for any messenger. If your family group chat, your school friends and your work contacts all live in LINE, no feature list from another app will matter as much as that network. It also suits people who like expressive chats, because stickers, themes and animated reactions are treated as first-class features here rather than decorations added at the end.

It suits less well anyone who wants a strictly minimal messenger. If you want one screen, one list of chats and nothing else, LINE will feel busy. The feed, the wallet tab and the sticker shop are all easy to ignore, but they are still there, and the app never quite hides them. People who want disappearing messages by default, or who want every chat encrypted with no exceptions, will also find better fits elsewhere, and the comparison section below spells that out.

LINE Features That Earn Their Keep in Daily Use

The feature list below covers what I actually used, not a marketing sheet. Each feature includes where to find it and what it does in practice, because a feature you cannot find is not a feature at all.

Stickers, themes and expressive chat

Stickers are the feature LINE is famous for, and they deserve that reputation. You buy or download sticker sets from the Sticker Shop, and a sticker then sits in your keyboard next to the emoji panel. A good sticker does the work of a sentence: a tired bear, a bowing cat, a character laughing so hard it falls over. LINE also sells animated stickers, sound stickers that play a short clip when sent, and custom stickers built from your own photos. Sticker suggestions appear as you type, so typing “sorry” or “thanks” offers a matching sticker before you finish the sentence.

Themes change the whole look of the app, from the chat background to the shape of the bubbles and the colour of the tab bar. Some themes are free, most paid themes cost a small amount, and a theme bought once applies across chats. I changed my theme once in the first week and then forgot about it, which is exactly how a theme should behave. It makes the app feel like yours without asking you to maintain it.

Voice calls, video calls and group calls

Voice and video calls start from any chat with one tap on the phone or camera icon at the top of the thread. Call quality on Wi-Fi was clear on my phone, with a short delay that felt normal for an internet call, and calls on mobile data held up well enough for a normal conversation, though video quality dropped a notch when the signal weakened. Group calls support many participants, and you can switch between voice only and video, mute yourself, or share your screen during a call from the in-call menu.

LINE also offers LINE Out in some regions, a paid service for calling ordinary phone numbers from inside the app, which is handy when the person you need to reach does not use LINE at all. Face Play and Watch Together style features have appeared in some builds for playing simple games or watching a video together during a call, but they are extras, and the core call itself is what most people will use every week.

Keep, Keep Memo, Notes and Albums

Keep is LINE’s personal storage shelf. You can save a message, photo, link or file to Keep from any chat, and it stays there until you delete it, separate from the chat it came from. Keep Memo is a private chat with yourself that works as a quick notepad: send yourself a link, a photo or a reminder and it waits there until you need it. I used Keep Memo for links I wanted to read later and for photos I needed to send to someone the next day, and it replaced a surprising number of screenshots I used to leave scattered in my gallery.

Notes and Albums live inside group chats and one-to-one chats, and they solve the problem of a photo disappearing up a long thread. An album holds photos shared in that chat in one grid, with comments and likes attached, so a holiday album stays findable months later. Notes work as a pinned board for announcements, links and files, and group admins use them for meeting times, shared documents and rules that new members should read first.

Polls, announcements and hidden chats

Polls let a group vote on a date, a restaurant or a plan without twenty messages saying “any time works for me”. You create a poll from the plus menu in a chat, set the options and a closing date, and the result sits in the thread where everyone can see it. Announcements pin a message to the top of a chat, which is the right tool for a changed meeting time or a link everyone keeps asking for. Hidden chats let you hide a conversation from the main list without deleting it, and a passcode lock can guard the whole app or individual chats from anyone who picks up your phone.

Previous LINE Versions vs the Current Build: What Changed

The title promises previous version differences, so here they are, plainly. LINE changes in small steps rather than one big redesign, and the differences below are the ones a returning user will actually notice after updating from a build that is a year or two old.

Older builds put the Timeline front and centre. Timeline was a social feed where friends posted photos and status updates, and it had its own tab and a prominent place on the Home screen. Recent builds replaced Timeline with VOOM, a short-video feed with recommended clips from creators and official accounts alongside posts from friends. The change is real and visible: the feed now leans toward short video and discovery, while friend posts sit in a quieter corner of the same feed. If you opened LINE to see what your friends posted, you now scroll past more recommended video to reach them, and that trade-off is the single biggest feel difference between old and new LINE.

The Home tab changed too. Older versions showed a long list of services and banners that felt crowded on a small screen. The current Home screen is cleaner, with your profile at the top, a shorter friends list, and services grouped under clear headings. The Wallet tab absorbed payment features that used to sit on the Home screen, which helps the Home screen breathe but means one more tap to reach anything payment related.

The Home tab redesign and where things moved

The redesign moved settings into a gear icon on the Home screen and moved friends into a list under your profile card. The first day after an update I hunted for two settings in their old places before finding them under the gear, and then I never hunted again. The lesson is simple: after a big update, spend two minutes opening the Home tab and the settings gear before you need anything in a hurry. Everything is still there, but the map changed.

What to check first after updating LINE

After any major update, check three things before your next important chat. First, open Settings, then Chats, and confirm your chat backup is turned on and recent. Second, open Settings, then Notifications, and confirm the alerts you want are still enabled, because updates sometimes reset a toggle. Third, open a group chat you care about and confirm its album and notes are intact. Those three checks take about two minutes and they catch almost every post-update surprise.

Timeline to VOOM: the change most people notice

VOOM is not a rename of Timeline. Timeline was a friend feed. VOOM is a discovery feed that mixes friend posts with short videos from creators, brands and official accounts. The practical effect is that LINE now competes for your attention with a video feed in the way older LINE never did. Some people enjoy that, and the clips are short and easy to skip. Others find it noisy, and for them the fix is to open VOOM rarely and to spend their time in the Chats tab, which has not changed in character at all. Your chats are still your chats, and VOOM never interrupts a conversation.

Chat backup, Keep Memo and Letter Sealing changes

Chat backup on Android uses Google Drive, and the current build prompts you about it more clearly than older builds did. When you set up LINE on a new phone, the app now walks you through restoring chats from your Drive backup before you reach the chat list, instead of leaving that step hidden in settings. Keep Memo arrived in an earlier update and has stayed since, and it is the feature I would point a new user to first, because a private note to yourself turns out to be useful every single day.

Letter Sealing is LINE’s name for end-to-end encryption, and it remains on by default for one-to-one chats and calls in current builds. A small lock icon in a chat tells you the conversation is sealed. Group chats and some official account chats use different protections, so the lock is worth checking if encryption matters to you for a particular conversation.

How to Set Up LINE Without the Fuss

Setting up LINE takes about ten minutes if you do it in order, and most of the frustration people report comes from doing the steps out of order, especially the backup step. Do the backup first on your old phone, then install on the new one, and the rest is straightforward.

1. On your old phone, open LINE, go to Settings, then Chats, then Backup and restore chat history, and back up to Google Drive. Wait for the confirmation that the backup finished before you do anything else.
2. On your new phone, install LINE, open it, and sign in with the same phone number or the same email and password you used before. Do not create a new account by accident, because a new account starts empty.
3. When the app offers to restore your chat history from Google Drive, accept it and let it finish before you start chatting. A half-restored chat list is harder to fix later than a slow restore now.
4. Set your profile name and photo, then add one or two close friends by QR code or by searching their LINE ID, so your first day has a real conversation in it.
5. Open Settings, then Notifications, and keep only the alerts you want. Turn off the noisy ones now, while you still remember which ones annoyed you.

Moving LINE to a new phone without losing chats

The move works when the backup on the old phone is fresh. A backup from three months ago restores three-month-old chats, and the missing three months are gone for good, so back up on the day you switch. The same rule applies to photos: chat backup covers messages and a limited set of media, and full-resolution photos in albums are best saved to your gallery before you switch. If the restore offers a choice between a quick restore and a full restore, pick the full one and wait.

Fixing the two setup problems I met most often

The first problem is a verification code that never arrives. The fix is to wait a full minute, check that the phone number you typed matches your SIM, and request the code once more rather than five times in a row, because repeated requests can trigger a short lockout. The second problem is a friends list that looks empty after a move. That usually means you signed in with a different account, so sign out, sign in with the original number or email, and check again before you start re-adding people by hand.

LINE vs WhatsApp vs Telegram vs Signal: An Honest Comparison

No messenger wins for everyone, and the honest way to choose is to match the app to the people you talk to and the features you actually use. The table below compares the four apps on the points that decided my own choice, and the paragraphs after it give each app its fair share of credit.

WhatsApp is the safe default where I live, because almost everyone already has it, and a messenger nobody uses is a beautiful empty room. Telegram is the pick for huge groups, channels and sending large files without thinking about limits. Signal is the pick when privacy is the whole point and you want the strongest default protection with the fewest extras. LINE is the pick when your circle already lives there and you want chats that feel warm and playful, with stickers, albums, polls and a feed in the same place.

If you enjoy comparing messengers, the Session article is a useful next read, because it shows how a different community handles the same everyday tasks with privacy as the headline. Readers who like social apps with a live feel often open the Chingari article next, and for a third perspective the Twitch article shows another approach to sharing and discovery. Comparing two or three apps for a day usually tells you more than reading about any one of them.

Pros and Cons of LINE After a Month of Daily Use

A month of short daily sessions gives a fair picture. The strengths below are the ones I noticed every day, and the limits are the ones that kept coming back, so both lists are short on purpose.

What LINE does well

Pros: the sticker and theme system is genuinely the best of its kind, and it makes everyday chats warmer without any effort. Group chats stay organised thanks to albums, notes, polls and announcements, which is rare in a messenger. Voice and video calls are reliable on ordinary Wi-Fi and mobile data. Keep Memo and chat backup on Google Drive make moving phones far less painful than it used to be. The app also handles photos and shared albums well, so a group holiday or a family event stays findable months later.

Where LINE falls short

Cons: the app can feel busy, because the feed, the wallet tab and the sticker shop compete for attention with simple chats. VOOM pushes recommended video into a feed that used to belong to friends, and that change still divides long-time users. Some features, including parts of the Wallet tab and LINE Pay, are limited by region, so the app you read about is not always the app you get. Account recovery after losing a phone number can also be slow, which is why the backup step in the setup section matters so much.

Who LINE is for, in one paragraph

LINE is for people whose friends and family already use it, for anyone who loves stickers and expressive chats, and for group organisers who need albums, polls and announcements in one place. It is less suited to minimalists who want one chat list and nothing else, and to people who need the strongest possible encryption on every single chat. The verdict is therefore a split one: if your circle is on LINE, keep it and learn its three best features well. If your circle is elsewhere, LINE is a pleasant second app, not a replacement for the one everyone already answers.

Troubleshooting LINE: Common Problems and Fixes

Most LINE problems have small causes, and the fixes below cover the ones I met or helped a friend fix. Try them in order, because the first fix solves the problem more often than people expect.

Messages not sending, or calls dropping

Check your connection first, because a weak signal makes any messenger look broken. Switch between Wi-Fi and mobile data once and send a test message to yourself in Keep Memo. If messages still fail, force-stop the app from Android settings and reopen it. If calls drop while messages work, the cause is usually bandwidth, so switch video off and continue as a voice call, then try video again when the signal improves.

Notifications arriving late or not at all

Late notifications are usually a battery setting, not a LINE bug. Open Android Settings, then Apps, then LINE, then Battery, and make sure the app is not restricted in the background. Then open LINE, go to Settings, then Notifications, and confirm the chat alerts you want are switched on. On some phones you also need to allow LINE to run in the background in the phone maker’s own battery manager, which sits apart from the Android settings screen and is easy to miss.

LINE using too much storage on your phone

Photos, videos and sticker packs add up over months, and LINE keeps a cache of media you have viewed. Open Settings, then Chats, then Delete data, and clear the cache first, because that removes temporary files without deleting your chats. Then open large group chats, open their albums, and save the photos you want to keep before deleting old media from inside the chat. Clearing the cache once a month kept the app noticeably lighter on my phone, and it takes less than a minute.

LINE FAQ: Questions Readers Ask Before Installing

Is LINE free to use for chats and calls?

Yes. Chats, voice calls and video calls between LINE users are free, apart from the mobile data or Wi-Fi you use. Stickers, themes and some extra content cost money in the Sticker Shop and Theme Shop, but the core messenger costs nothing, and you can use it for months without buying anything at all.

Does LINE work on a PC or tablet as well as a phone?

Yes. LINE offers desktop apps for Windows and Mac and a tablet version, and you sign in with the same account, often by scanning a QR code on the desktop screen with your phone. Chats sync across devices, so a conversation started on your phone continues on your computer, though some phone-only features, including parts of the sticker shop, behave slightly differently on desktop.

How do I keep my chats when I change phones?

Back up on the old phone first, through Settings, then Chats, then Backup and restore chat history, using Google Drive on Android. Then sign in with the same account on the new phone and accept the restore when the app offers it. That order matters: a backup made after you have already wiped the old phone cannot exist, so do it before you hand the old phone over or reset it.

Is LINE safe for children and family group chats?

LINE is widely used for family chats, and its privacy settings let you control who can add you as a friend and who can find you by ID or phone number. Turn off the “allow others to add by ID” option for a younger user, review the friend list together, and use hidden chats and a passcode lock on a shared device. No messenger replaces a conversation about what to share online, but LINE gives a family the controls to have that conversation with real settings behind it.

What is the difference between Timeline and VOOM?

Timeline was the old friend-first social feed inside LINE, while VOOM is the current short-video feed that mixes friend posts with recommended clips from creators and official accounts. The chats, calls and albums did not change with that switch, so if you only use LINE for messaging, the difference barely touches you. If you used Timeline to follow friends, you will now scroll past more recommended video to reach their posts.

If you want to give LINE a proper try, use the link below. I suggest trying it for a full week before you judge it, because a week of short sessions shows the real character of a messenger far better than a single evening does. Click here to download the LINE app

For a similar app with a different flavour, Click here to download the Chingari app. For a second option with privacy at its centre, Click here to download the Session app. The lasting lesson from my month with LINE is a simple one: a calm tool used steadily beats a powerful tool that never gets opened, and LINE earns its place by being there, quietly, every single morning.