Line and Viber are both online messaging and free calling apps for android devices which had been in a fierce battle over the number of users, practically from the first day of their launch. But while Viber had taken a back seat initially, it finally managed to soar ahead of Line in October, 2014. With 209 million users, as compared to Line’s 170 million, Viber has every reason to gloat about its victory over Line. The data was garnered through the financial report released by Rakuten, the owner of Viber. The report also shows the worldwide advancement of Viber in a positive light as it is currently installed on 12 percent of the total smartphones in the world while Line is installed on only 10 percent. Rakuten is hopeful that Viber will be able to attract even more revenue in the coming three months. The victory over Line certainly seems to have put the developers of Viber in a hopeful mood.
However, one set back which Viber is bracing itself for is that it might face being blocked out of China. Although it is still very hush hush and no official statement has been made by the Chinese government, but many users of Viber have reported that they cannot access Viber in China now. On the other hand, there were many others who claimed that Viber was working fine on their devices. Romain Dillet, a writer for TechCrunch, had reported that messages sent through Viber were not delivered, while TechinAsia reported that users from China could not connect to the official website of Viber while using a Chinese ISP. There seems to be a lot of confusion about Viber’s status in China. It is quite possible that it may have been blocked only one some networks since the users of Unicomm 3G said that they did have smooth access to Viber.
The bad news is that China has been notorious for banning many social networking apps. In fact, Line was a favourite among the Chinese before it got banned. Consequently, they switched over to using Viber, which in turn helped Viber gaining an advantage over Line with its increased base of users. But if Viber too is blocked in China, the numbers might fall again. China is a big country with a huge population of smartphone users. And all these users will just have to switch again to another similar app which is still unblocked. The Chinese government seem to be on a messaging app blocking spree this year. Not only did they block Line, but Instagram and Kakao Talk also came under the hammer. Past record shows that China has blocked many social networking sites too, the most popular being Facebook, Twitter, Taptalk and Snapchat. Only Apple seems to have been spared as its imessaging service still works perfectly in China. It seems imminent that Viber too will be forced to leave China soon. And in light of the changed circumstances, Line and Viber would in all probability once again become cut-throat rivals.