OAKLAND, Calif — Encrypted messaging apps Signal and Telegram are seeinghuge upticks in downloads from Apple and Google’s app stores.Facebook-owned WhatsApp, by contrast, is seeing its growth declinefollowing a fiasco that forced the company to clarify a privacy update ithad sent to users.
Mobile app analytics firm Sensor Tower said Wednesday that Signal saw 17.8million app downloads on Apple and Google during the week of Jan. 5 to Jan.12. That’s a 61-fold increase from just 285,000 the previous week.Telegram, an already-popular messaging app for people around the world, saw15.7 million downloads in the Jan. 5 to Jan. 12 period, roughly twice the7.6 million downloads it saw the previous week.
WhatsApp, meanwhile, saw downloads shrink to 10.6 million, down from 12.7million the week before.
Experts fear the shift may reflect a rush of conservative social mediausers seeking alternatives to platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and thenow-shuttered right-wing site Parler. The mainstream sites suspendedPresident Donald Trump last week and have tightened enforcement on violentincitement and hate speech.
Parler, meanwhile, was unceremoniously booted from the internet after Appleand Google banned it from their app stores for failing to moderateincitement. Amazon then cut Parler off from its cloud-hosting service.Experts worry that these moves could lead to more ideological splinteringand further hide extremism in the dark corners of the internet, making itharder to track and counteract.
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WhatsApp didn’t do itself any favours when it recently told users that ifthey don’t accept a new privacy policy by Feb. 8, they’ll be cut off. Thenotice referenced the data WhatsApp shares with Facebook, which while notentirely new, may have struck some users that way.
Confusion about the notice, complicated by Facebook’s history of privacymishaps, forced WhatsApp to clarify its update to users this week. Thecompany said that its update “does not affect the privacy of your messageswith friends or family in any way,” adding that the policy changes werenecessary to allow users to message businesses on WhatsApp. The notice”provides further transparency about how we collect and use data,” thecompany said.
WhatsApp is still by far the most popular messaging app of the three, andso far there’s no evidence of a mass exodus. Sensor Tower estimates thatSignal has been installed about 58.6 million times globally since 2014. Inthat same period, Telegram has seen about 755.2 million installations andWhatsApp a whopping 5.6 billion — almost eight times as many as Telegram.
