Home > Business > Industry

Why KakaoTalk’s typing indicator is getting on some Koreans’ nerves

Published: 17 May. 2025, 18:08

CHO YONG-JUN
[email protected]

KakaoTalk's typing indicator in action [YONHAP]

The three-dot indicator showing someone is typing is widely used across Instagram, iMessage, Facebook Messenger and more, but some Korean users balked at the feature when KakaoTalk introduced a beta release last week.

People online have expressed their discomfort with sharing their typing status to others and said it reminded them of messengers used in their workplace.

The feature was added to Kakao Lab on Tuesday and was enabled for people who opted to use the service. Kakao Lab is an early-access feature where users can test "upcoming features" before they are rolled out to all users.

KakaoTalk's typing indicator feature [SCREEN CAPTURE]

Other features on Kakao Lab include AI features that summarize chats upon the user's request and other minor quality-of-life addons.

"We added the feature so the flow of conversation doesn't stop and so it makes it feel more like a real-life conversation," KakaoTalk said.

The typing indicator, however, received more backlash than support from users, at least according to comments below related news articles, prompting multiple online posts of people complaining about the new feature.

"Can you, instead of updating useless stuff, actually work on making your service more stable?" a user wrote on Threads, which received almost 300 likes as of press time.

Another user feared the messaging app would soon add a status feature and the last login time, making it indistinguishable from work messenger apps such as Microsoft Teams.

Users can go to KakaoTalk's Settings page and then to the Kakao Lab page to turn off the feature.

BY CHO YONG-JUN [[email protected]]