Download APK LINE Layout Changes, Feature Highlights & Review

I first opened LINE on a calm evening while my phone was still charging, and the first thing I noticed was how much the front screen had changed since the version I remembered. The chats were still there, exactly where my thumb expected them, but the row of tabs along the bottom told a different story. Home, chats, short video, calls and payments now sit side by side, and the app feels less like a single chat window and more like a small hub for daily life. That shift is the heart of this review: the layout moved, the feature list grew, and the everyday experience changed with it.

LINE started life as a messaging app from Japan and grew into one of the main ways people stay in touch across Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia, with hundreds of millions of users. It carries text chats, voice calls, video calls, stickers, photo albums, group chats and payment tools in one place. In recent versions the team behind it has rearranged the furniture more than once, renaming the old Timeline feed, giving payments its own tab and pushing short video higher up the screen. Some of those moves help. A few of them take a week to get used to.

This article walks through the layout changes one tab at a time, names the features that actually matter in daily use, compares LINE with three very different alternatives, and finishes with an honest list of pros and cons. I tested the current layout on Android over several weeks, moved my main group chats around, tried the call tools on mobile data and on Wi-Fi, and paid attention to where I kept tapping the wrong icon. If you are returning to LINE after a break, or opening it for the first time, this is what you will find.

LINE layout changes: what moved and where to find it now

The biggest layout change in recent LINE versions is the bottom navigation. Older versions opened on a simple row of friends, chats, timeline and calls. The current layout keeps five tabs along the bottom on Android: Home, Chats, Voom, Calls and Wallet. Home replaced the old friends list as the first screen, Voom took over from Timeline as the short video feed, and Wallet gathered payments, coupons and points that used to hide inside menus. Chats stayed in second place, which matters, because chats are still the reason most people open the app.

Home is now the profile screen and the service shelf in one. Your profile picture, display name and status message sit at the top, followed by shortcuts to Keep Memo, services and settings. Tapping your profile opens the edit screen for your name, picture and background. The gear icon for settings still lives on this screen, near the top, which catches out people who remember settings living under a separate tab. Once you know it is on Home, the rest of the layout starts to make sense.

The Chats tab looks familiar at first glance and different on a closer look. Pinned chats sit at the top, unread badges are bolder, and a long press on a chat opens a quick menu for pin, mute, hide and delete. Search moved to the top of the list and now searches messages, friends, groups and official accounts in one pass. A small filter row in some versions lets you jump between all chats, unread chats and groups. None of this changes how a message is sent, but it changes how fast you find the right conversation at 7 in the morning.

The Home tab and Keep Memo

Keep Memo is the chat with yourself that LINE quietly turned into one of its most useful corners. It sits near the top of Home and inside your chat list, and it works as a personal notepad: paste a link, a photo, a voice note or a short reminder and it waits there until you need it. I use Keep Memo for addresses, tracking numbers and links I want to read later. Items saved to Keep Memo stay on the device and in your account, and you can forward anything from it into a real chat in two taps. The old Keep storage service that held files for longer has changed over time, so treat Keep Memo as a quick shelf rather than a permanent archive, and keep anything precious in a second place too.

Chats list, folders and pinned conversations

Pinning is the single layout habit that pays off fastest. A pinned chat never sinks below new messages, so the family group and the one friend you message every day stay at the top no matter how busy the list gets. Muting works the other way: a loud group keeps arriving but stays silent, and its badge count stops shouting for attention. Hiding a chat removes it from the list without deleting the history, and you can bring it back from settings. Together these three gestures turn a chaotic list into something you control, and they cost about a minute to set up.

Pinning and muting a chat in two taps

Long press any conversation in the Chats tab and the quick menu appears. Pin puts it at the top with a small pin mark. Mute silences its notifications while the messages keep arriving. Both can be undone the same way, and neither tells the other person anything. I pinned three chats and muted four groups in my first week, and the list went from noisy to calm without losing a single message.

Finding Keep and Albums after the move

Albums live inside each chat, under the menu at the top of the conversation, and they hold photos shared in that chat in one grid instead of buried in the message history. Keep Memo lives on Home and in the chat list. If you open a group and cannot find its photos, tap the group name at the top and look for the album and shared files sections there. The names stayed the same across the redesign; only the road to them changed.

LINE messaging features that still define the app

Strip away the new tabs and LINE is still, first and last, a messaging app. Text messages send fast, read receipts show when a message has been seen, and the app handles poor connections better than most chat apps I have used. Messages can be unsent, copied, forwarded, replied to in a thread and saved. Photos send at a size you choose, and a long press on a photo offers the full-size option before you send it, which matters when the picture is the point. Voice messages record with one hold, and they play back inside the chat without opening another screen.

One honest trade-off sits underneath all of this. LINE protects one-to-one chats with its Letter Sealing encryption, which is end-to-end encryption under a friendlier name, but you need to check that it is switched on, and some features such as multi-device sync behave differently when it is. Group chats have their own rules, and official account chats are not private conversations at all. The app is private enough for everyday life, and it is not the tool to pick if your whole reason for choosing a messenger is maximum privacy. That distinction belongs in the comparison section below, not buried in a footnote.

Stickers, themes and emoji that carry the conversation

Stickers are LINE’s signature, and they are still the reason many people pick it over a plainer messenger. The catalogue runs from free sets to paid packs drawn by well-known artists, and a monthly sticker subscription opens a large library for a flat fee in regions where it is sold. Stickers can reply to a message, react to a photo and fill a whole conversation when words feel like too much work. Themes change the background, the bubble colours and the tab icons, and a dark theme is there for late-night chats. Emoji sit beside stickers in the same picker, and the app suggests a sticker as you type, which is either delightful or distracting depending on your mood.

What surprised me after a month was how much of my daily chatting runs through stickers rather than text. A short sticker answers a question, marks a joke and ends a conversation politely, all in one tap. The risk is a bill that grows quietly if you buy packs one at a time, so I set a rule for myself: free sets and the subscription library first, paid packs only for the two or three characters I actually use every week.

Voice and video calls, group calls and screen sharing

Voice calls on LINE are free between users, and the quality holds up well on a normal mobile connection. Video calls add face filters and a background blur, and group calls bring a whole group into one call with a grid view. Screen sharing works inside a video call, which turns LINE into a passable tool for showing a photo, a map or a document to someone far away. Call quality drops on a weak signal the way every calling app does, and switching from Wi-Fi to mobile data mid-call can still stutter, so I keep important calls on Wi-Fi when I have the choice.

Calls also live in their own tab now, with recent calls and a dial pad in one place. Missed calls show a badge, and a tap returns the call without hunting through the chat list. It is a small change that saves a surprising number of taps across a week, and it is the kind of layout move that only makes sense once you have used it for a few days.

Albums, Keep and Notes that hold shared memories

Every LINE chat can hold an album, and albums are the quiet workhorse of the app for families and travel groups. Photos dropped into an album stay organised by date, and anyone in the chat can add to them. Notes pin a message to the top of a chat so an address, a date or a link does not sink under a hundred new messages. Announcements do the same job for groups, with a banner that every member sees. These are not flashy features, and they are the ones people miss most when they switch to a messenger that does not have them.

LINE Voom, OpenChat and official accounts explained

Voom is LINE’s short video feed, and it replaced the old Timeline as the place for public posts and clips. Open Voom and you get a vertical feed of short videos, photos and posts from accounts you follow and from creators the app thinks you will like. You can like, comment, share and follow from inside the feed, and creators can post longer clips alongside short ones. It is closer to a social feed than to a chat feature, and that is exactly why some long-time users ignore it completely while younger users open it first.

My own habit settled in the middle. I check Voom for a few minutes when I have time to spare, and I never open it when I need to send a message quickly. The feed learns fast, so a few likes on cooking clips will fill it with cooking clips, and the only way to change that is to follow different accounts and use the not-interested option on the ones you do not want. Treat it as a separate app that happens to live inside LINE, and it stops getting in the way of the chats.

OpenChat communities and how they work

OpenChat is LINE’s answer to public group chats. Anyone can join an open chat room about a hobby, a game, a city or a fandom, using a separate profile and nickname so your real name and main profile stay private. Rooms have admins, rules and member limits, and popular rooms can hold thousands of people. The idea works well for narrow interests, and it works badly for rooms with no active admin, where the conversation drifts and the spam creeps in. I joined two rooms about photography and one about local food, kept the photography one, and left the other two within a week.

Official accounts, coupons and LINE services

Official accounts are business and creator profiles that send updates, coupons and service messages. Following a shop or a service gives you its news and its discounts, and it also gives you its messages, so the follow list deserves the same tidy-up as any inbox. The Wallet tab gathers the payment side: LINE Pay where it is available, coupons, points and linked services. Availability varies a lot by country, and some services that exist in Japan do not exist elsewhere at all, so the Wallet tab can look full on one phone and nearly empty on another. That is normal, and it is worth checking what your region actually offers before you judge the tab.

LINE vs Session vs Signal vs Buffer: how they compare

LINE does not live alone on a phone, and the fairest way to judge it is next to the apps people actually compare it with. Session and Signal are both private messengers with very different ideas about privacy, while Buffer is not a messenger at all: it is a scheduling tool for social media posts. Putting them in one table looks odd until you see the point, which is that each one answers a different need, and LINE sits in the middle as the everyday all-rounder.

If you enjoy the everyday experience of LINE then Session is a natural next app to try and it offers a different angle on the same kind of activity. Session keeps your phone number out of the picture entirely, which LINE does not, and its chats route through a decentralised network instead of central servers. The trade-off is a smaller crowd: your friends are probably already on LINE, and they may not be on Session yet. I keep Session for a small circle and LINE for everyone else, and that split works better than forcing one app to do both jobs.

When you want a change of pace then Buffer covers that need neatly. Buffer will not replace your chats, and it is not trying to. It lines up posts for social accounts, picks the best time to publish them and shows how they performed, which is a job LINE never attempts. If you run a page, a shop or a small project alongside your personal chats, Buffer handles the public side while LINE handles the private side, and the two do not compete.

And for a third option Signal is worth a look as well. Signal is the simplest privacy story of the three messengers: encryption is on by default, the app keeps very little about you, and the interface stays plain on purpose. It has fewer stickers, no Voom feed and no payment tab, and that is the point. If your main worry is privacy and you want it without thinking about settings, Signal answers it more directly than LINE does.

LINE pros and cons after a month of daily use

A month of daily use leaves a clear picture. LINE is fast, friendly and full of small tools that add up, and it asks you to accept a busier home screen and a privacy story that needs a settings check. The list below is the honest version, including the two points that annoyed me most, because a review that only praises is not a review.

LINE pros: what it does well

• End-to-end encryption with Letter Sealing on one-to-one chats, plus read receipts, unsend and threaded replies that make daily messaging smooth.
• Stickers, themes and albums give chats a personality that plain messengers do not match, and group albums keep shared photos organised without extra work.
• Voice and video calls are reliable on normal connections, group calls handle a crowd, and screen sharing turns a call into a quick way to show something.
• Keep Memo and Notes act as a personal shelf inside the app, so links, addresses and reminders stop getting lost in the chat history.
• The layout keeps chats one tap away even with the new tabs, and pinned chats, mute and search make a long list easy to manage.

LINE cons: where it strains

• Privacy needs a manual check: encryption settings, data sharing and official account messages all deserve a look in week one, and the defaults are not the strictest available.
• The home screen can feel crowded, with Voom, Wallet, coupons and service shortcuts competing for attention next to the chats you actually opened the app for.
• Some services and payment tools only exist in certain countries, so the Wallet tab can feel half empty depending on where you live.
• Sticker spending adds up quietly if you buy packs one at a time, and the free sets alone do not cover every character you might want.
• Backing up chats before switching phones takes a few steps and a linked account, and skipping it is the easiest way to lose a chat history.

Who LINE is for

LINE fits people who chat every day with the same circle, run family or hobby groups, and like stickers, albums and calls in one place. It fits parents keeping a family group tidy, friends planning a trip in a group chat, and anyone whose social life already runs through LINE in their country. If your friends, your family and your local shops are on LINE, the network effect alone is a strong reason to stay.

Who should look elsewhere

LINE is a weaker pick if your first demand is maximum privacy with no settings to check, if you want the plainest possible messenger with no feed and no payment tab, or if none of your contacts use it. In that case Signal or Session fits the privacy need better, and a plain texting app fits the simplicity need better. The honest test is your contact list: open LINE, count the people you actually message, and the answer usually makes itself.

Setting up LINE and shaping it to your habits

Setup takes about ten minutes if you do it properly, and most of that time goes to the backup and privacy checks rather than the account itself. The steps below follow the order I used, and each one has a check at the end so you know it worked before moving on.

1. Create or sign in to your account with your phone number or email, then set your display name and profile picture. Check that your friends can find you by the name you expect.
2. Open Home, then settings, and switch on Letter Sealing if it is not already on. Check it again after a day, because this is the setting that protects your one-to-one chats.
3. Pin your three most-used chats, mute the loudest groups, and turn on notifications only for the chats that need them. Check the list the next morning and adjust what still buzzes too much.
4. Set up the chat backup with a linked email or account, and run the first backup before you change phones. Check that the backup date shows today.
5. Pick a theme and a sticker set you like, then stop. The catalogue will still be there next week, and a calm screen helps more than a full sticker shelf.

First-week setup checklist

By the end of week one you should have three pinned chats, a working backup, notifications that only buzz for people rather than for every group, and a Keep Memo with at least one useful note in it. If any of those four is missing, fix that one thing before you explore Voom or the Wallet tab. The app rewards a tidy first week for months afterwards, and a messy first week costs a little attention every single day.

Notification settings worth changing first

Open settings, then notifications, and decide per chat rather than for the whole app. Keep sound on for one-to-one chats, switch busy groups to silent, and turn off the preview text on the lock screen if you share your phone with anyone. A notification that shows the message text on a locked screen is a privacy leak in plain sight, and it takes ten seconds to switch off.

Backing up chats before you switch phones

Chat backup lives in settings under chats, and it needs a linked account to work. Run a backup on Wi-Fi, wait for the date to show as today, and only then move to a new phone. Text backs up more reliably than photos and videos, so save the pictures that matter into an album or onto your device first. I learned this the careful way: a backup that says it finished is worth more than a backup you assume finished.

LINE privacy, safety and troubleshooting

Privacy on LINE is a settings job, not a single switch. Letter Sealing covers one-to-one chats, and you can check it per chat. Block and report sit in the same menu as the mute button, and blocking someone stops their messages without telling them. Hidden chats add a passcode layer for conversations you want behind an extra step, and the app can lock itself behind your phone lock or a passcode of its own. Take ten minutes with these screens in week one and the app gets noticeably safer without getting harder to use.

Official accounts deserve a separate look. Every shop, service and creator you follow can message you, and the list grows quietly. Open the official accounts list once a month, unfollow the ones you no longer read, and the message list gets calmer at once. The same tidy habit applies to OpenChat rooms: leave the rooms you stopped reading, and keep the one or two where the conversation is still good.

When something goes wrong, the cause is usually simple. Messages that will not send often mean a weak connection, so switch between Wi-Fi and mobile data and try again. Calls that sound distant usually mean the other person is on speaker in a noisy room, not a fault in the app. Notifications that never arrive usually mean the phone system silenced the app, so check the phone-level notification permission before blaming LINE. If the layout looks wrong after an update, check the tab bar first: an update may have moved a feature to Home or Wallet, and the search bar at the top of the chats list finds almost anything faster than hunting through menus.

LINE layout and features FAQ

What changed in the LINE layout?

The bottom navigation now holds Home, Chats, Voom, Calls and Wallet. Home replaced the old friends list as the first screen, Voom replaced Timeline as the short video feed, and Wallet gathered payments and coupons. Chats stayed in second place, settings moved onto Home, and calls got their own tab with recent calls and a dial pad.

Is LINE free to use for calls and messages?

Yes, messages, voice calls and video calls between LINE users are free, and you pay only for your own internet connection. Stickers, themes and some extra packs cost money, and a sticker subscription is sold in some regions. Payments and shopping inside the app are separate services with their own prices.

How do I back up my LINE chats?

Link an email or account in settings, open the chats backup screen, and run a backup on Wi-Fi. Check that the backup date shows today before you switch phones. Save photos that matter into an album or onto your device first, because text backs up more reliably than large media files.

Can I use LINE without a phone number?

LINE normally asks for a phone number or an email to create an account, and a number makes finding friends easier. Some versions allow email sign-in, and some features still ask for a number later. If avoiding a phone number entirely is your main need, Session is built for that and LINE is not the best match.

Why does my Wallet tab look empty?

Payment tools, coupons and linked services vary by country, and several of them only exist in Japan and a few other markets. An empty Wallet tab usually means those services are not offered where you live, not that your app is broken. Check for an app update, then check what LINE lists for your region before you worry.

Final verdict: is LINE still worth a place on your home screen?

After a month with the new layout, my answer is yes, with one condition: set it up properly in the first week. Pin your chats, check Letter Sealing, sort notifications and run a backup, and LINE becomes the calm, fast messenger it is meant to be. Skip that setup and the same app feels noisy, crowded and harder to trust, because the defaults leave too much switched on and too much unsorted.

The layout changes are a fair trade in the end. Voom and Wallet add things some people want and others ignore, but neither of them moved the chats, and the chats are the app. Stickers, albums, group calls and Keep Memo still do the daily work, and they do it better than most rivals. If your circle is on LINE, keep it, tidy it, and let it do its job. If your circle is elsewhere, or privacy without settings is your first demand, try Signal or Session first and keep LINE as the second app, not the first.

When you are ready to give LINE a proper try then use the link below and it takes you straight to the LINE page on AndroidRU. Click here to download the LINE app. I suggest trying LINE for a full week before you judge it, because a week of short sessions shows the real character of an app far better than a single evening does.

A similar app is worth a quick look too. Click here to download the Session app. For a second option, Click here to download the Buffer app. Try each one for a few days, keep the one whose daily rhythm fits yours, and delete the rest without guilt: a home screen with one messenger you actually use beats a folder full of apps you never open.