Alphabiz - KakaoTalk Faces Backlash Over Major Update as Users Flood App Stores With One-Star Reviews

Photo courtesy of Yonhap News

[Alpha Biz= Kim Jisun] SEOUL, Sept. 28 – KakaoTalk’s largest update in 15 years has sparked widespread criticism from users, many of whom are leaving one-star reviews on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store while demanding a rollback to the previous version.



According to the ICT industry, UX design group PXD analyzed 1,000 reviews posted on September 23, the day of the update, using its Affinity Bubble insight tool. The analysis revealed that the majority of comments pointed to a deterioration in user experience. Among them, 42% expressed overall dissatisfaction with the update, calling it “the worst update ever” and criticizing Kakao for “failing to understand consumer needs.”



Design and user interface (UI) changes accounted for 19% of the complaints, while 10% focused on issues with the friend list and profile features. The new update transforms the friend tab—which previously displayed profile photos and status messages—into a grid-style feed of recent profile updates, resembling Instagram. To view a traditional friend list, users must now click an additional button at the top of the tab.



One Play Store user wrote: “I don’t want to watch short-form videos, but KakaoTalk added them to the new ‘Now’ tab. Please roll back to the old version or at least let us turn this feature off.”



Kakao responded, stating it is “listening to user feedback and will reflect it in future improvements.”



Naver also recently faced strong backlash after overhauling its mobile blog homepage on September 10. Its introduction of AI-driven content recommendations was criticized for promoting sponsored content over posts from users’ blog neighbors. Following user complaints, Naver partially reverted the “Like” feature to its previous format.

Alphabiz Reporter Kim Jisun(stockmk2020@alphabiz.co.kr)