LINE Official Account

The Auto-Reply and Sub-Admin Dance

Setting up an auto-reply in this app sounds straightforward. You toggle it on, write a default message, and walk away. But add a sub-admin to the account, and the behavior changes. The sub-admin can see incoming chats and respond manually. When they do, the auto-reply stops firing for that specific conversation. The system assumes a human is now handling it. This creates a gap. If the sub-admin reads a message but does not reply, the auto-reply never triggers. The customer sees nothing. No acknowledgment. No automated "we will get back to you." The statistics dashboard records the sub-admin's action as a "reply," but the auto-reply count stays unchanged. That skews the data. The business owner looking at the stats sees fewer automated responses than expected. They might think the feature is broken. It is not broken. It is just designed around a single-admin assumption that does not survive real-world team usage.

Broadcast messaging works differently. It ignores sub-admin status entirely. Any admin can send a broadcast to all followers. The system does not check who pressed send. The statistics panel logs the broadcast under the account, not under the individual admin. This means a business cannot track which sub-admin sent which campaign. For a small shop with one owner, that is fine. For a larger operation with multiple marketing staff, it becomes a blind spot. The only workaround is to use separate official accounts for each team member. That costs more and fragments the follower base. The app gives you the tools, but the tools do not talk to each other in the way a growing business needs.

What the Old LINE@ Did Better

LINE@ shut down in 2019. The company merged it into this app. Many users still compare the two. The old version had a simpler member management flow. You could add a team member with a few taps. The new app hides that setting. Users report being unable to add members at all. The link to invite a partner shows "unable to add you" with no explanation. The old version also allowed bulk photo selection for timeline posts. This app forces you to pick one photo at a time. Each selection triggers a loading spinner that takes several seconds. For a business posting ten product images, that is minutes of waiting. The clipboard restriction is another pain point. Sellers who copy and paste product descriptions all day get only four quick-reply slots. The old LINE@ had no such limit. These are not bugs. They are deliberate design choices that prioritise a different workflow. The problem is that workflow does not match what the existing user base actually does.

The messaging API integration is where this app pulls ahead. Developers can connect the official account to external CRMs, chatbots, and automation tools. That was not possible with LINE@. The API supports webhooks, rich menus, and narrowcast targeting. A business can send different messages to different follower segments based on behaviour. The old system treated all followers the same. So the trade-off is clear: you lose some ease of use, but you gain programmatic control. For a tech-savvy team, that is a fair swap. For a traditional retailer, it is a downgrade.

What Actually Changed in the Recent Updates

The July 2026 update brought a redesigned login and account creation screen. The company called it a UI improvement. The layout now uses larger input fields and a clearer progress indicator. The "minor bug fixes" line in the changelog is vague. No specific issues are named. Based on user reports, the update did not fix the chat window scroll problem in Firefox. It did not address the photo upload lag. It did not increase the quick-reply slot count. What it did change is the account switching flow. Users with multiple official accounts can now switch between them without logging out and back in. That is a genuine quality-of-life improvement. The previous version required a full re-authentication. The update also adjusted the statistics refresh rate. Data now updates every fifteen minutes instead of every hour. That helps businesses running time-sensitive campaigns.

The August 2026 security patch added encryption for data in transit. The app already had that, but the patch tightened the implementation. No visible changes came with that release. The version number jumped from 7.1.1 to 7.2.0. The APK size increased by about two megabytes. No explanation was given for the size change. Some users on the Play Store speculate it is related to new ad frameworks. The company has not confirmed that.

The Firefox Scroll Quirk That Nobody Talks About

Open the web-based manager in Firefox. Switch between customer chats. The window jumps up to an older message instead of staying at the bottom. This is not a random glitch. It is a re-rendering issue between Firefox's DOM handling and the app's React code. The scroll anchoring mechanism gets confused. It locks onto a timestamp from minutes ago and pulls the viewport up. The only fix is to manually scroll down every time you switch chats. That adds friction. For a support agent handling fifty conversations a day, that friction becomes a productivity killer. The issue does not occur in Chrome or Edge. It is Firefox-specific. The company has not acknowledged it publicly. The Mozilla support thread has been open since August 2026 with no official response. Users have tried clearing cache, disabling extensions, and using troubleshoot mode. Nothing works. The workaround is to use a Chromium-based browser for the manager. That is not a solution. It is a concession.