OAKLAND, California (AP) – Signal and Telegram encrypted messaging apps are seeing huge increases in downloads from Apple and Google app stores. Instead, Facebook-owned WhatsApp is on the rise following a fiasco that forced the company to clarify a privacy update it sent to users.
Mobile app analyst Sensor Tower said on Wednesday that Signal had 17.8 million downloads of apps on Apple and Google in the week of January 5 to January 12. This is a 61-fold increase from just 285,000 the previous week. Telegram, an already popular messaging app for people around the world, recorded 15.7 million downloads between January 5 and January 12, about twice the 7.6 million downloads it saw last week. precedence.
Meanwhile, WhatsApp saw downloads drop to 10.6 million, down from 12.7 million the previous week.
Experts believe the change may reflect a bunch of conservative social media users looking for alternatives to platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and the now-closed Parler site. Regular sites suspended President Donald Trump last week and strengthened the implementation of violent incitement and hate speech.
Meanwhile, Parler was unceremoniously launched from the internet after Apple and Google banned him from app stores because they failed to moderate the incitement. Amazon then removed Parler from its cloud hosting service. Experts worry that these moves could lead to ideological divisions and further hide extremism in the dark corners of the internet, making it difficult to pursue and counter.
WhatsApp did itself no favors when it recently told users that if they do not accept a new privacy policy by February 8, they will be discontinued. The notification referred to the data that WhatsApp shares with Facebook, which, although not completely new, could have hit some users in this way.
Confusion about notification, complicated by Facebook’s history of privacy accidents, forced WhatsApp to clarify its user update this week. The company said its update “does not in any way affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family,” adding that policy changes were necessary to allow users to send messages to companies on WhatsApp. The notification “provides additional transparency on how we collect and use the data,” the company said.
WhatsApp is still by far the most popular messaging app of the three and so far there is no evidence of a mass exodus. Sensor Tower estimates that Signal has been installed approximately 58.6 million times globally since 2014. In the same period, Telegram saw approximately 755.2 million installations and WhatsApp was 5.6 billion – nearly eight times more than the Telegram.