OAKLAND, California (AP): Signal and Telegram encrypted messaging apps are experiencing big rises in downloads from Apple and Google app stores. Facebook-owned WhatsApp, by contrast, is seeing its growth slow after a failure that forced the company to clarify a privacy update it had sent to users.
Sensor Tower, a mobile app analytics company, said Wednesday that Signal recorded 17.8 million app downloads at Apple and Google during the week of Jan. 5-12. This is an increase of 61 times from just 285,000 the previous week. Telegram, an already popular messaging app for people around the world, recorded 15.7 million downloads during the period January 5-12, about twice the 7.6 million downloads it saw the previous week. .
Meanwhile, WhatsApp saw downloads drop to 10.6 million, up from 12.7 million the previous week.
Experts believe the change may reflect a wave of conservative social media users looking for alternatives to platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the now-closed site Parler. Conventional sites suspended President Donald Trump last week and tightened enforcement of violent incitement and hate speech.
Parler, meanwhile, was unceremoniously ripped off the Internet after Apple and Google banned it in their app stores for not moderating the incitement. Amazon then withdrew Parler from its cloud hosting service. Experts worry that these movements could lead to a further ideological split and further hide extremism in the dark corners of the Internet, making it difficult to monitor and counter.
WhatsApp did itself no favors when it recently told users that if they do not accept a new privacy policy before February 8, they will be hacked. The notice referred to the data that WhatsApp shares with Facebook, which, while not entirely new, may have affected some users in this way.
Confusion about the warning, complicated by Facebook’s history of privacy setbacks, forced WhatsApp to clarify its update to users 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 WhatsApp companies. The notice “provides more transparency about how we collect and use the data,” the company said.
WhatsApp remains by far the most popular messaging app of the three and so far there is no evidence of mass exodus. Sensor Tower estimates that Signal has been installed approximately 58.6 million times worldwide since 2014. In the same period, Telegram has recorded about 755.2 million installations and WhatsApp has been 5.6 billion , almost eight times more than Telegram.