OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) – Signal and Telegram encrypted messaging apps are seeing huge increases in downloads from Apple and Google app stores. Facebook-owned WhatsApp, on the other hand, is seeing its growth slow after a fiasco that forced the company to clarify a privacy update sent to users.
Mobile application analyst Sensor Tower said on Wednesday that Signal saw 17.8 million application downloads from Apple and Google during the week of January 5-12. This represents a 61-fold increase from just 285,000 in the previous week. Telegram, a messaging app already popular with people around the world, had 15.7 million downloads in the period January 5-12, almost double the 7.6 million downloads the previous week.
WhatsApp, in turn, saw downloads shrink to 10.6 million, from 12.7 million the previous week.
Experts believe the change may reflect a race by conservative social media users looking for alternatives to platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the now closed right-wing website Parler. Major sites suspended President Donald Trump last week and stepped up enforcement against violent incitement and hate speech.
Parler, meanwhile, was unceremoniously removed from the Internet after Apple and Google banned him from their app stores for failing to moderate the incitement. Amazon then cut Parler off its cloud hosting service. Experts fear that these movements could lead to further ideological fragmentation and further hide extremism in the dark corners of the Internet, making it more difficult to track and neutralize.
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 cut. The notice made reference to the data that WhatsApp shares with Facebook, which although they are not entirely new, may have impressed 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 affect the privacy of its messages with friends or family in any way”, adding that changes to the policy were necessary to allow users to send messages to companies on WhatsApp. The warning “provides more transparency about how we collect and use the data,” said the company.
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 about 58.6 million times globally since 2014. In that same period, Telegram saw about 755.2 million installations and WhatsApp a whopping 5.6 billion – almost eight times more than the Telegram.