OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) – Encrypted messaging apps Signal and Telegram are seeing a massive increase in downloads from Apple and Google’s 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 it sent to users.
Sensor Tower, a mobile app analytics company, said on Wednesday that Signal saw 17.8 million app downloads on Apple and Google in the week of Jan. 5 to Jan. 12. That’s a 61-fold increase from just 285,000 the week before. Telegram, an already popular messaging app for people around the world, saw 15.7 million downloads in the period from January 5 to January 12, about twice as many as the 7.6 million downloads the week before.
WhatsApp has now seen the number of downloads drop to 10.6 million, from 12.7 million a week earlier.
Experts believe the shift may reflect a flood of conservative social media users looking for alternatives to platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and the now-closed right-wing site Parler. The mainstream sites suspended President Donald Trump last week and tightened enforcement of violent incitement and hate speech.
Parler, meanwhile, was unceremoniously booted from the Internet after Apple and Google banned it from their app stores for failing to moderate incitement. Amazon then cut Parler off from its cloud hosting service. Experts fear that these moves could lead to more ideological fragmentation and further hide extremism in the dark corners of the Internet, making it more difficult to track down and counter.
WhatsApp has failed itself when it recently told users that if they don’t accept a new privacy policy on February 8, they will be cut off. The notification referred to the data WhatsApp shares with Facebook, which, while not entirely new, may have affected some users that way.
Confusion over the report, complicated by Facebook’s privacy accident history, forced WhatsApp to clarify its update to users this week. The company said the update will “in no way affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family,” adding that the policy changes were necessary to allow users to message businesses on WhatsApp. The notice “provides greater transparency about how we collect and use data,” the company said.
WhatsApp is still by far the most popular messaging app of the three, and there is no evidence of a mass exodus so far. Sensor Tower estimates that Signal has been installed approximately 58.6 million times worldwide since 2014. Over the same period, Telegram has seen about 755.2 million installs and WhatsApp a whopping 5.6 billion – almost eight times the number of Telegram.