The signal is taking a moment.
In the past few days, it has become the number one free app on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store, mainly because of three things totally out of its control. The first was the move by Facebook and Twitter to block President Trump from his platforms, which prompted many of his supporters to look for alternatives
So one of those alternatives, Parler, was removed by Apple and Google from their respective app stores due to information that linked some users of the right-wing social media app to the attack on the United States Capitol building. Parler later went completely offline when Amazon closed its AWS account.
Finally, WhatsApp updated its privacy policy earlier this week and required users to accept sharing some information with Facebook before continuing to use the app. The confusion surrounding the change and mishandling of the implementation made people concerned that it was just another Facebook data capture. In response, Elon Musk tweeted “Use Signal” for his 42 million followers.
As a result, people migrated to the encrypted messaging app, which is supported by the nonprofit Signal Foundation. On Monday alone, Signal Messenger was downloaded by more than 1.5 million users. According to Sensor Tower, which provides mobile app analytics, Signal was downloaded 17.8 million times during the week of January 5. This is quite extraordinary for an application that generally averages around 50,000 downloads per day.
The increase in downloads has even caused problems with the Signal verification system, causing delays in setting up accounts for new users.
Signal is still the underdog.
WhatsApp is still the most popular messaging app, with more than 2 billion monthly users, despite its recent mess in the privacy policy. Signal, on the other hand, had about 20 million app installs at the end of last year, according to App Annie, an app analytics platform.
The reason, however, that the diverse group of users suddenly fell into Signal has much more to do with what happened long before last week. This is important because, although millions of people may be hearing about it for the first time, it didn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere.
Signal’s previous spotlight came during the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer. At that time, it was a reflection of the app’s popularity among activists, journalists and other security-conscious users who value the fact that Signal messages are never stored on the platform’s servers and can only be decrypted by the intended end user.
A nighttime success, years in the making.
Signal was co-founded by Brian Acton, who also founded WhatsApp. After the latter was acquired by Facebook, Acton left and created the non-profit organization to develop an open source encryption protocol, which – ironically – was later adopted by WhatsApp as well.
A big difference, however, is that Signal’s privacy protections are good enough that when the company was asked to deliver information about a user by a grand jury subpoena, the only information available was the date the account was created and the last activity. There was no information about the user’s messages or contacts.
Even if someone managed to intercept an encrypted message, it would simply look like a messy mess. Only the intended recipient, with the correct security key, is able to decrypt it. The signal encrypts all conversations by default. You cannot turn it off, even if you want to.
This is different from another application that is having a week. Telegram reached second place in the iOS App Store at the same time as Signal, with more than 400 million users. Although Telegram offers end-to-end encryption, it is disabled by default and cannot be used on channels within the platform.
Privacy is highlighted.
If nothing else, it is a good thing that people are starting to pay attention to the way that many social media platforms treat their personal information. While WhatsApp’s new privacy policy isn’t really that different from what it was before, the fact that people are so concerned is an indication of how they feel about big tech companies like Facebook, which monetize their personal information as a business model.
Signal is different, not only because it has sophisticated encryption protecting your conversations, but because it was configured from the beginning to be different. The company does not display ads. It does not sell your information. He doesn’t even charge money. As a non-profit organization, it exists for a purpose and is supported by donations.